By Pranavi Vedula
I find your face in every corner of the congregated night1
Your laugh settles into the cracks in the sky,
the silences between the pearly-white glints of stars.
It is July,
and raccoons are burrowing beginnings through the inky soil,
threatening to encroach upon my memory of you.
I am cursed like in the stories of old,
to lose my form at dusk,
to be revived at dawn,
but I no longer remember if I was that butterfly,
ribboning a home through tree branches, failing, stagnant,
static, hoping for quick, quiet metamorphosis.
What if I was that hillside river, dappled with light and glacial cold,
coursing my way back to the place we called home?
Or what if I was a fossil sheathed in some sandy bank,
crystallized, scabbed over, glazed:
breakable and brittle?
And what if I was a girl, feet bare, washed in moonlight,
running through the tall grass, attempting to capture both
lightning bugs and lightning in the same jam jar.
What does it mean to miss someone?
It means it’s summer and everything is aflame;
everything is gorgeous;
you are gorgeous
1Taken from D.A Powell’s “Calling All Gods”
Pranavi Vedula is a rising junior at Phillips Exeter Academy. She is an alumna of the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. She has previously been published in The WEIGHT Journal and The Good Poetry Zine. Pranavi is also an editor for Active Voice Magazine. When she’s not writing, she loves listening to French pop music and watching way too many movies at once.
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