Seasonal.

1.

Sheridan was my mom’s best friend’s last name but my mom goes through a lot of best friends. I remember the plush feel of her hugs and wonder why dust falls into the grooves between her and people she isn’t related to by blood.

Barren people don’t mix well in the day-to-day when forced to interact with people who have grown into pairs like you. Sapphire strike, blue boycott… a heartbreakingly sore and sullen vacation from codependence.

2.

Circles of fluorescent light do not quite illuminate the whole room and we need light for this. There she was, legs and arms akimbo on the coffee table. There she was, creating variations in the skies. There she was, cluttering the surface.

Forest is lost in the trees. Trees are lost from the forest. We keep spitting words back and forth like ping-pong practice. Coagulating on the surface of the blood like platelets.

3.

Stay ensconced in the spin of the scones across the crust of the sugar glass counter. It collapses and relapses just like you, but you don’t care, do you? Every day is the same old change and every change ends the same old way. Missive to a submissive, document for a dominant. There’s nothing left to counterfeit. There’s nothing left to counterfeit. I thought all the girls were over it.

There’s a missing person poster on the pole outside my hole in the wall apartment and there’s a picture of a little girl who I think belonged to a doctor or something but they never did catch up with her documents and by the time they did it was completely over. Everything was over. It bled out in their shaking, clutching hands as it pulsed and popped.

4.

It’s always ‘people I once knew’ and never the long time muse for the painting of a new personality. Validate the strumpet. Tell her she’s in strunt and that dirty mistresses only get sassafrass blooms on Saturn. Spinning missiles may drive into the missing document, but some things don’t mix well. Some arrows point only down.

You should practice staying close because the tide drags something fierce. You should fight the tide. You should ride the tide.

prose by sirenasilver
photography by emily kelly