it was overcast

Design by Emily Hu

Image Description: A brunette girl and blonde boy sit on the floor of a bedroom with the blinds closed behind them, and gloomy blue light peering through. They are illuminated by the light of a candle that sits on the ground between them.

sunday, the blinds were closed
I fondled your torment and dangled it between us
in our low-lit world, it was barely visible
and yet visibly bare

a gone child’s bedroom floor cradling
his shadow and a confidant
cross-legged, cross-hearted

I prodded bare-fingered
warily through your wincing
worried I had hurt
you but it was mortification
urging me to probe with a stick of sorts
ashamed of staining my hands

and the unknown organ
our eyes could hardly taste without puckering,
wailed to us

its song drenched
by a cold cloud of fear and the late blood
of chafed wounds

melodic in the heedful
extension of its lungs,
fretful of unseaming stitches

it sang, a flame on the hardwood
unbeknownst to its own sound
or mouth until
some deific hand
          birthed it
                        frictionally
                                     to brighten and warm
                                                 another

and destroyed itself the way all flames take their last breath, in
          whisper
                        black exhale
                                   nowhere to go but toward the
                                                  ceiling

a life only as long
as the wick inside it

and I said I was birthed for others too before leaping
to wrap myself around it
          like I could act a shell

molten, shaped, cooled, cut, paralyzed
hollow inside aside
          from your sickness I now cherish

I was raised on bottles, in a bed for two
I said, because you like my riddles
           and my body is a bandage you don’t want to know

and I can’t repeat what it told me
but like a silent film, I can show how it

                                                                   hung between and above.
                                                                             a chandelier           

 melted sand                   smoothed glass                   prismatic               illuminating piece                  of decor

I preferred it to the stream of blue light
beyond your windows
I said the blinds were meant to be closed
that sunday