Jenna Ribbing
I. All these years, and the world is still telling you to straighten up.
II. Dinner was ready. You were standing by the window, waiting for permission to let
the sun in, and when it hit our skin, a visual fire…it felt like sugar.
III. I think much of time must get lost, and that most words are only a restatement of
the problem. In my mother’s dreams, she’s clawed my face until I have no eyes for you.
She’ll reach her sorry grave never knowing how I’ve already been blinded.
IV. It’s rotten work, making a garden out of weeds. And yet I’ve a fascination with
things that only seem to exist to disturb instead of enliven. A little too much and never
quite enough.
V. I’m aware of my shadow and how it affects you.
VI. You’re smoking again, but I still want you to come home, I still want you to come
inside, you whisper. This is the disease talking, always talking, talking, talking…and
who’s to tell if it’s been talking about you or talking to you? You’ll feel better in the
morning, I whisper. But you never do.
VII. Would we still be here if not for the systemic illusion that we’re constitutionally
incapable of making the same mistake twice? A blue rush of twilight, a prosody of
insects, and you…riddled with all these scars, with all these lines where you’re broke
open, where light pours out, where you shine.
VIII. I lost my foot through the windshield again.
IX. In the distance, I see a memory of you, hear your strange, melodic voice explaining
a passion—and it hurts, it will always hurt, that someone so young could be drowning,
could be excitedly yearning for the concept of choice. It hadn’t hurt back then, of
course. Back when we were just kids, your nose in a book and my nose in a fight, back
before I realized that the only thing keeping you afloat wasn’t the story on the pages…
but your hand wrapped firmly in mine.