sneaks, age 27
It’s Christmas and that means we’re children again. We giddy our way back to teenage bravado. It’s late. All the house eaten and drank and asleep. The window in the bedroom coughs onto the roof and we - who never snook out or needed to from this house - escape. It’s dangerous and not really. Our laughter could wake the moon if she were sleeping. We navigate, find youth through mischievousness, keys weighing in our pockets counting time, a way back in.
Now the dark world is ours - trees and grass, the good kind, full of secrets and jokes and fairies egg us on. There is a second heart insides us that always leads to water. The town at night is nearly always soft and listening for our footsteps. Each beat is a louder greeting to her - our sea, like our grandmother, we go to her first. Replenished we continue our time travel; backs on webbing at the childrens’ playground, we spend some time at star-worship, the sky a quiet mirror of us, gladdening in all this living.
night words forgotten
we laugh over breakfast instead
ribs tight with secrets