epitaph in memory of seasons that pass only once - poem

Around the kitchen table, we sort our reasons as to why love is a pocketknife blade. Love, we say, puts you in a kennel and buries the key. The men who wear love are the ones who make the news. Privately, I decide that when I quietly plummet to the ocean, the sun will have wanted to taste me too. And you did look for me under the mulberry tree? I saw you there: willing, pink and full.

I didn’t leave the house, the last October of childhood, and I never touched your open palm. Nobody asked anything of me, when it came to you. I put my hands in one box and my body in another and began the scrupulous process of turning my skin inside-out. Friends never performed blameless exorcisms. We didn’t let the telephone cord dangle in high school sweetheart gore. You hang up. No, you hang up. 

It doesn’t matter. I’m a device of organs and teeth. Feed me a coin and there’s a coin in my stomach. Give me love and it stays - a little for each mechanism. Some in my lungs. Some in my stomach. Some in my liver. There will be too many stitches to undo when the operation comes. I will be a limp puppet of skin folds. In seven years I will regrow around myself. Maybe then, our myth can end.

For seven more years I’ll crush berries between fingers. There will be other anthologies. You turn thirteen only once but you never stop being thirteen. You only gather years on top of it. Things aren’t always opposites. Like singular and eternal. Like our allegory. There was no end and no beginning. Something still happened in the middle. You see? You could pry open the love I gave you and find it empty still.

i wrote this poem in the late spring of 2024. there are a couple lines that i don't like, but overall i'm proud of it. it's meant to be about a girl i met when i was 13, but also about feelings that never stop being a part of you, even when you're done feeling them.