Revelation
My first goodbye was to
every character bound in ink,
paper, and fiction. The bible.
My parents told me the
Tooth Fairy, Santa,
and the Easter Bunny, aren't real.
Thursday of the same week,
my best friend was buried with cancer.
Her favorite color was purple.
Mommy, is God fake too?
My aunt was the first body
I ever watched pale on an operating table.
I see her in beat up pictures, denial has
the tissues and won't give them back.
I wanted to pray, but my aunt never
picked up the phone before,
why would she now?
There is a girl with
scarred hands that grip gently.
Her eyes are deep and ignite
something warm in this
ghost of a believer.
With every breath of air
between her floodgate of kisses ---
A inferno of faith dizzies
me to where the days concave
and I'm left grinning like a fool.
Last night I prayed to her,
hoping my words will make
her abandon faith too.
Striae
She tries to thread
her leaves above the canopy,
so she can drink from the sun too.
She has stretch marks;
Faint, silver threads
carefully woven into her
bark by time.
She has broken branches
layering the forest floor;
Some from stormy nights alone
others from the saw.
The track down the street
has stretch marks too;
They run deep in its tar.
She traces the cracks with
her toes. She has never been
to the Grand Canyon,
but the way her envy carves
channels through this red,
reminds her of its smoldering clay.
Just as the fried dough,
crisp, gold, and haloing,
comes into view --
There's a tingle on her tongue.
There's that urge, a pull to
Just stretch, rip, tear at the
funnel of fried heaven.
Where others have left her
cold. It's warm, a partof her.
These marks, swollen and pink,
they are part of her too.
She wonders what the sun tastes like,
but if it's something that will stay.
Astronaut
I see darkness in the lines
of his knuckles.
His skin, polished brass.
His eyelashes, raven
with years of flight.
He says to me,
study love.
So I break the robin’s shell
and peek through to discover
moons dusted, soft as pillows,
comets combusting, laying scarlet
for the black,
a nebula --
swirling iris that could
be mistaken for my own.
I don’t want to blink,
I might miss it.
About the author: Abigail Tyrrell is a STEM and Humanities Scholar at Rockville High School. Her poetry and prose have received recognition in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, winning a national silver medal. Abigail is Rockville High School's Poetry Out Loud Champion. She’s spent the previous two summers working as a writer’s apprentice at the Mark Twain House & Museum. Abigail has been published in theBluffton Literary Journal, and the Eunoia Review.
