The flavors, one after another: you, mouthing off in tongues; then breakfast for lunch and vice versa, meaning maple all around; slicked salt beneath my boots; a stretch of teething road with chalkboard clouds; the cashier and her disinterested brows, bad coffee at the cinema beside a lady smiling at a map and her breath is like eucalyptus. The rain goes on, though only
when I squint to look,
there were evergreens in South Strafford, where I thought I was coming alive with the pines and flowers and a pond behind a cabin. Maybe I was, like when you came up walking barefoot from the lake one nearly-summer, read Mary Oliver from my laptop naked, for what it’s worth. Shivering awake with the taste of maple creemee, already syruping my steering wheel going fifty
round the bend, it took you weeks to step inside a car again, well
Springfield-Greenfield snow gets altered in observation. Only really there when you aren’t looking, (so drive safe!), through the windowpane: receding glaciers, tanned forehead of the world — a serpent from the roadside, gowned — like the Pope! — in hospital with rabbit stew from styrofoam. Now there’s styrofoam across the world, so light, so easy till it twangs apart and there
it is, dustmotes streaming by streetlight; the world draped over us and beaten like an
old rug; trick of the light, sedimenting the shelves of Commonwealth Ave or Federal Street, a pile of earnest sand saying “Che,” “that,” “that,” “that” pooling in infertile crescents from my Joshua Tree to your high desert delta, stretchmarks of your sandstone couch. There was hardly even a vestige of blood, Ariadne. “Don’t break her heart” you said, spooling me out with widowed red.
The house is the same size as the world; or rather it is the world. Here, her belly, axis mundi,
pithy navel, shitty bumblebee tattoo, on every hip my asking mouth. Asking for a trash bag to wear as poncho, lukewarm chocolate to drink as coffee. The snow which is now rain goes on, though only when I squint to look. I read my Bishop, try out wearing clothes. It’s quarter past noon inside the car your father totalled years ago and my fingers remember their prunes. How to keep this jacket dry? I guess you just
Writer | Luchik Belau-Lorberg ’28| kbiscocho25@amherst.edu
Editor | Aidan Cooper ’26 | acooper26@amherst.edu