IT IS OVER BUT I AM STILL HERE, by Jaiden Geolingo

I.

Everything is rusting & slithers through my fingers

                & my mouth a portal to nostalgia. Shutters over the camera,

a flicker of luminescence to stave off the night’s shadow. What is teenhood but this thesis:

                backs to the asphalt, lips acidic, our tongues melting with aluminum. I want to be motionless

tonight, I want my hands to pass through an empty vessel, I want every strand of heat to hold

                our sweat-sweet bodies as our mouths spill into delirium.

II.

Forget the collision in our bones & the cathedral of light that yearns to envelop us

                like thrumming skin. I ache. I tumble. I dream of translucence. A requiem for liminality

sliding past the vaulted sky. The scattering of bodies into porch steps: the director tells me,

                “Go home! It’s over now!”            so I inhale the memory, pale & ghastly,

permeate through the vein till the sun turns too harsh to sustain the lungs. Yes, this is how we

                learn to be linear in momentum: to touch the thin layer of film separating the body &

the sky long enough to hold the hour.

                The darkness seeps into the sun & I never wish to go past

                                                                this moment.