To:

poetry by Staci Eckenroth

Midnights dissolve into mid-mornings and

sleepless stumble. Through hours of fog,

driving down well-lit highways, they hope for

illusions that others are as forgotten in the blanketing

thick enough to blackout histories, like

memories of a boy’s body. Posed

in his casket while a girl in the corner steals

tissues and prayer cards, stuffing them in fistfuls

down her pockets. She keeps him as a reminder.

I ask, of what? She answers, of losing,

and fading scars from answers injected into

veins. My mother begs between inhales

of her cigarette, words hanging with smoke

trails: don’t ever do this to me.

But when sunlight spreads through maples, I

watch the sky move from black to purple to blue

like gradations of pixels. My grayscale eyes

knew these colors once, but now I only see cloud coverage

pushing the memory of his calloused fingertips

running over my hipbone from my mind. I still feel

the flutter of his eyelashes on my shoulder blade,

and goose bumps pimple across my skin

in waves of passion or loneliness

or misunderstanding. There was no note,

no one worth mentioning, but the sleepless

continue because we promised we would.

---

Staci Eckenroth is a senior creative writing major at Susquehanna University. She's obsessed with notebooks, the color yellow, and how memory works.  She has been previously published in RiverCraft, The Blue Route, and The Susquehanna Review.
 

Coming next week: fiction by Rob Rotell