Still Warm and Plentiful
Nowadays, friends release your wrist and you are closer
to strangers, sparrows, carvings in restroom stalls,
teachers, bus drivers, discarded ATM receipts at the laundromat,
the baby-banged girl you hardly know who tilted her head
and silently zhuzhed your hair. How you slink through
your apartment door at the end of the night,
drunk, heavy-lidded, laughter lodged like gum in your
throat, how the two of you have had spells of not speaking but tonight
springs eternal when she laughs and says that you left your sock
on the bathroom floor. Time is the best writer I know
and silver spills out of the corners of her mouth, hardening
into tin. Light casts shadows we try to replicate
and oh, you look beautiful in this photo let me take more and
oh, isn’t it dire how we are all in the same place
for now. I wander through sheets of smoke aimless and waiting
for someone to listen, wide-eyed and judgment a far-off,
inhospitable land. I fall asleep. I have dreams of spoons
and silk and bicycles. We gather together in a room and listen
to music played by other people. When this is over, everything will fall
back into me like a whirlpool of shooting stars surrendered to the wind.
Sophie Sala (she/her) is a poet and essayist. She enjoys writing about the passage of time, both the simplicities and complexities of joy, and birds. She is the recipient of the McDowell Award in Nonfiction, and her work has been featured in several literary magazines, such as Rainy Day Magazine and The Oakland Review, amongst others. She currently resides in Pittsburgh (and the rain is her favorite part).