by Mars Core
Once, there was the babbling of currents,
the spring of children’s laughter.
Excavations of clay cut into the high bank
with pinch pots firing in the sun.
Rocks sent to murky graves in feet-tossed silt,
smashed open to draw out hobbyist pigments.
The girl I played with under the boughs of white oak
is gone, and so is the girl that she played with.
In my hand, the arrowhead we found bites at my palm,
pressure sluicing away blood from the bed of skin.
Leaves choke the thinning throat of the creek
as it crawls bare and gasping beside the easement.
The water, melt-blood of summers, plays in my veins,
carves pathways behind my feet in the dirt.
The one I became twists flowers to coat hangers,
and smooths down pen nibs like river stones.
What evaporates in the oven of girlhood,
falls again in the twenties’ autumn.
Mars Core is an English major at OSU studying Creative Writing. They plan to remain at OSU and pursue an MFA in Poetry. Their first love is illustration, and their work explores self-reconciliation and otherness, often through connection to the sea, marine wildlife, and speculative fictions. They live in Jenks, Oklahoma, and spend their time not writing adding new sharks to their collection of trinkets.