By SARAH DOWN
You have tainted every sacred space
You– who held me holy in my love and rage
Kissed my balm-blistered palms
And wiped milk from my lips
You– who built fantasies in the canopies
Nailing board on branch as I gawked from below
Nestled in the goldenrods, prancing on pine dust
I was young and you knew
Gentle when I reached for the dirt in your hair
My sap-sticky hands smudging circles on your scalp
when you couldn’t scrub it out
I lathered honey through your hair
Leaning headlong into a sink
Whose drain consumed your curls
Giddy to steal your sweetness
Over broken bathroom tiles
As you worshipped a forest that spat you out like stale gum
And I tried to stay peaceful
Weaving myself in– to your cotton long-sleeves
(the muddy-colored ones that smell of weed and gasoline)
But your collar caged my throat
As you tugged me up those ragged trails o’ Katahdin
Teasing Wolfe’s Neck from my eyes
I forgave you one pebble at a time
For crashing my car
For cutting my hair
And smashing my piggy bank
(it doesn’t matter anymore
none of it matters anymore)
Because as Winter holds us in her flaking palms
You dare to tell me that my life is wrong and your life is right
in your righteous hypocrisy
I counted on you like I count the cracks in my ceiling
There every night, like the stars in my sky
You’ve caught me thinking of home
Where we learn to love and hate and cry
Where you rustled above me in the top bunk
Its frame holding us like a bowl of peeled and sectioned oranges
Mom’s hummy-humming floating from the living room
Squeezing under our door
Wrapping us like dumplings in our worn wrinkled sheets
Are you still awake?
Do you still forgive me for kicking you under the dinner table?
For scratching your CDs and swinging my fishing hook into your arm?
Please don’t tell Mom, please?
Every day I wish to tell her what I fear you will tell her first
But instead I whisper into the pine groves
Remember that Maine has always been
Yours before mine
His before hers
So I pray as you break my heart
That you may find a sister among the spruce
A confidant in the conifers
A love between the lies
Writer | Sarah Down ’27 | sdown27@amherst.edu
Editor | Sam Huang ’26 | lhuang26@amherst.edu