Brambles: All About You I tried to draw you but forgot your face – No, tore it cleanly from the picture frame like a widowed man cleansing his home of your ghost. I see you every morning, scanning your pupils for the person who slid down cold metal banisters with me, cackling at blackberry brambles, arms reaching for each other’s pulses like symbiotic sea creatures – I do not miss this. I try not to miss – We left hope in our dirty school backpacks tangled in the decaying bushes of glen canyon. When I examine your regenerated face I see only a boy who forgot the sound of friendship and replaced it with the static rumble of popularity. Time does not have gauze wraps or ointment to sink itself into my wounds – Time does not carry a first aid kid overflowing with bandages, neosporin Witch Hazel. So when you tell me Time can heal I will ask you to bring me her stitches, and weave them patiently in and out the gashes in my chest, my neck – Heal me. Or let me simmer like raw meat in a cauldron, fizzing with the resentment you gave me no choice but to chew on. The image of you has faded to a shadowed sepia, wrinkled by my fists – We are no longer nocturnal creatures, insects feasting on bone marrow under saturn’s glow – I have formed callouses from touching your skin and my tear ducts are swollen, a pale red – do not let me fly through the moth holes in your mind, for jasper and jade stones are my hollow sisters – I teethe again like a baby, orphaned by your hissing obsidian glare – So now I know what love should taste like. Bitter acidity on my tongue, fear – that when we wake up your skin will be cold. Friendship did not begin or end with us – We are the fossilized creations of evolutionary failure, what the solar system spat out, the dairy that grew sour in the milky way. Drugs hidden by dinosaur bones – you have made me realize I am not an archeologist. Sometimes I wish – all the stars have fallen now and if we are what’s left of humanity…I surrender myself to the earthworms that spoil us with their lustful consumption of our corpses.
Haze is a junior in creative writing at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco. They have work published in several literary publications, including Synchronized Chaos, Blue Marble, The Weight Journal, Teen Ink, and Parallax Journal, and have performed their poetry at the Youth Art Summit in San Francisco and 826 Valencia. When Haze is not writing, they can be spotted cuddling their three cats, holding their python, feeding their tarantula, or rescuing insects from being squashed.