June Images

Sabrina, 12th - Sunnyvale, CA
​I. Livid taste buds in a world beginning to open

I am developing new habits. Like being flexible with pens.
Writing full poems in the empty space of a book. Not crying
whenever I please. I’m in Town & Country seeing a world waking
and reading my first Hemingway; writing a poem in it too.
It’s June; it’s loud; I feel it being loud. It’s June, which is to say
poetry has made the dynamic world a different thing. I mean,
the world has made the dynamic world a different thing.
The whiteness of Palo Alto, heat of the real summer world.
I mean, anything we do now is shrouded with the contents
of this year’s spring. New life in summer. Paella, a living thing.

II. On Sibelius: tilt your chin skyward, light through the window blinds

All we have ever done is for beauty. Heaven come down
and strike us all, lowly bodies grasping for permanence,
grasp for intervals, grasp for goodness. I will be ebb,
you will be flow; we are earthlings; we name everything
the wheel, do not reinvent. True story: I have turned my
bed into a desk. I split my time between wanting to be
prodigious and wanting to be loved. But honestly
Saint Francis has better desires for my heart than I do and
I very much trust him so at the end of the day I’m lifting
up his prayer; who knows, maybe it revises my heart.

III. My new period cup

There’s a learning curve when it comes to putting it in,
I mean, this is a violent, serious act. I am interested in being
sustainable in hosting this blood fount but more interested
in suppressing the fount, or rather, gathering it. Cranberry
jam under my fingernails. No one likes cranberry, and
it’s only tolerable in cranberry white peach juice which
my mom mixes in her sangrias. We cope with today’s world
by celebrating something every week, it seems. Today’s
celebration: inching along the learning curve, spotless,
my cup full, womanhood continuous, poetry restorative.