my father once told me that to
start you need an end in mind
but the last time he held me was
when i was 4 and though it’s
been years i am longing still
(for his warmth and for the
start he spoke of.)

the day lulls my bones into
half-remembered memories,
my mouth clinging to the
polished wood of being 7 &
chasing the momentum in flight,
of things i left behind,
things that left me behind.
there is an end & a beginning there,
but i say this like the phases of a moon
strung into the sky like my fingertips reaching.

there is a rhythm in everything that
happens like the rise and fall
of a being just breathing but
sometimes it’s hard to catch my breath.
you are moving on and on and
sometimes it’s hard to catch up to you.

my fingerpads smudge glass with oil & amino acids,
and i feel like the stilling of glass when arid sand is done melting.
amber and honey-sap crystallizing and i am the fly caught in them,
a struggling creature suffocating.
darling, you flight-struck thing, i am drowning.

yes, we have been painted in tiger’s eye
and gold before- in the colours of the
ichor that gods use to immortalize themselves
and yes, we have always been so
young and stupid enough to pretend
we could call down lightning but
see, when your paint-stains come off
that’s where i want to start.

flakes of electric colors cling to your hands,
the dips into your palms and the tracings of your veins,
and it’s never a thunderbolt in zeus’s fury, but this tastes like it.
we are young & we are stupid & we have never been anything but,
but here i am and i want to be something made
of the color of your skin where paint peels off,
the secular sound of your heartbeat.

so what if you want to be made of
stardust and the endless gap from
where my home last resided? there
is nothing beautiful about whatever lives
beneath my primary colours and listen,
honey, you are silver-tongued and sugar words
but honey, you will never glow
in the dark because you are iridescent and
i am made of the dying light.

the space behind my clavicle is
a thousand prettier words for the
carcass of a dead star.
honey, what do you want,
out of the shape of my mouth
formed around your name?
honey, darling, sweetheart,
i don’t know what to breathe
and the sky seems like i could shatter it,
my fingernails tapping on blue air.

i’ll breathe the early morning mist if you
can find it in yourself to wait for the
sun to rise because i’ve never seen myself
not gold-wreathed and you deserve the warmth our star has to bring and at
night when i dream it’s always you-
your hair. your hands.
your throat bent to my teeth.

darling, i want the sun sighing around our silhouettes,
turning our shadows into studies in chiaroscuro.
darling, i want to see if i could cut you into ichor,
because the taste of your mouth is mango-memories & godlike.
oh, darling, it’s you. it’s always you.

i want you summertime-dizzy
and i want to taste the melon
from your fingers like it could
heal my old wounds before
they fester to the sun. i
want to see if your shadow
splinters when the light
reaches you- like a fourth
grade science experiment.
like we are young and
still begging to learn, in
all the heat-waves the
prism glass will give us.

say that it’ll be glinting richness before dusk,
the way the sunbright catches against mirrors,
the spreading of cherry just that sweet &
just that red on my tongue.
it’ll be a summer and
the ice infecting my skin will flee
(and the winter will be dead, but it will be okay, now.
the world will be okay, now, my fingers framing your face.),
the light haloing like gold-leaf over your head,
the ink pressed into my skin like diagrams and science.
hypothesis: it will be okay. it will be okay.
proof: the place where your hands meet my skin. the place where my heart goes to rest.

tell me the summer-struck day will come // written by @undercelestialstars & @swan-blooded