Later

I wear the season as a skin and know that I’m inhabited

by myself and a growth, or some feeling of growth. 

I write poems for myself, read them, write them over again.

I listen to carefully selected songs on repeat.

Summer passes like ginger ale, which I’ve never tasted,

ice-cube after ice-cube melts against my stomach and slides.

I tell everyone that I am resting. I hate resting and want it taught me.

Going to the sea is something; a kingdom’s worth of seaweed -

foot after foot running across the sand - all I’d ever learnt.

When I talk to friends, I feel like doing it on an old telephone,

so I can twirl out the cord and touch the distance between us.

I keep displacing things but they find their way back again.

Later, I am lying on my bed at the thrown-across angle

of the heat, and I am thinking some familiar thought

which requires little effort, feeling my skin grow so quick it splits.

Maya Little