The summer you spent with your fingers
braced against a grimy rest stop sink, eyes
sunken & bloodshot under the fluorescent
lights; the summer when you spent forty
(mid)nights dreaming of your teeth falling
out of your head & onto the tile. So it’s the
wreckage of an empire. So you don’t call
your mother anymore or go home for the
holidays or look in the rearview mirror.
So you’re still imagining you’re something
you’re not & pretending to be proud of it.
Another day. Another nightmare. Another
morning spent choked & half-drowning at
the bottom of the pool. Another million years
in which you kept running because pain makes
a sound too loud to drown out & so you did
everything you could to escape to a room where
all the walls said was you’re alone now & you’ll
be alone always & no one can hear you screaming.
But nobody’s following you anyways, so what
does it matter if your mic’s been cut? Your hands
that forget they are yours braced against another
sink. The tea kettle whistling in the background.
Tomorrow you’ll wear someone else’s face.
Tomorrow the billboards will say are you awake
yet? Are you awake yet? Are you awake yet? It’s
a lovely, predictable routine in which you hang
all your jackets in the motel closet & take them
down three days later. (You have a thousand
footraces with time but it always leaves you in
the dust.) The California sky. The endless miles
of terrible sandwiches & almost-deserted highways.
(How long before you run out of gas?) Fear turns
you to ash from the inside out & hope knits you
back together. You keep running, suffocating
under too-heavy memories & trapped in a
reality you can’t outlast. A new town, new
story, new pair of fuzzy dice sitting on the
dashboard. The earth writhes beneath your
sneakers. The world tells you again & again
& again kid, you’re going to fall off this
tightrope, just wait & see. You put the coffee on
to boil & remind yourself not to look down.
braced against a grimy rest stop sink, eyes
sunken & bloodshot under the fluorescent
lights; the summer when you spent forty
(mid)nights dreaming of your teeth falling
out of your head & onto the tile. So it’s the
wreckage of an empire. So you don’t call
your mother anymore or go home for the
holidays or look in the rearview mirror.
So you’re still imagining you’re something
you’re not & pretending to be proud of it.
Another day. Another nightmare. Another
morning spent choked & half-drowning at
the bottom of the pool. Another million years
in which you kept running because pain makes
a sound too loud to drown out & so you did
everything you could to escape to a room where
all the walls said was you’re alone now & you’ll
be alone always & no one can hear you screaming.
But nobody’s following you anyways, so what
does it matter if your mic’s been cut? Your hands
that forget they are yours braced against another
sink. The tea kettle whistling in the background.
Tomorrow you’ll wear someone else’s face.
Tomorrow the billboards will say are you awake
yet? Are you awake yet? Are you awake yet? It’s
a lovely, predictable routine in which you hang
all your jackets in the motel closet & take them
down three days later. (You have a thousand
footraces with time but it always leaves you in
the dust.) The California sky. The endless miles
of terrible sandwiches & almost-deserted highways.
(How long before you run out of gas?) Fear turns
you to ash from the inside out & hope knits you
back together. You keep running, suffocating
under too-heavy memories & trapped in a
reality you can’t outlast. A new town, new
story, new pair of fuzzy dice sitting on the
dashboard. The earth writhes beneath your
sneakers. The world tells you again & again
& again kid, you’re going to fall off this
tightrope, just wait & see. You put the coffee on
to boil & remind yourself not to look down.
Leela Raj-Sankar is a teenage poet from Phoenix, Arizona. You can find more of her work in Burning Jade Arts & Lit as well as in upcoming issues of Ex/Post Magazine and Analogies & Allegories Literary Magazine.