by Garrett Milligan

 

In the murmuring dust, a factory’s son wants to collide again. He longs to run after the eve’s wings and trace Lily’s wayward glow.

Boarded up, in the basement of self, Lily Briscoe rang her head. Does he remember when we ran on ice?

In the shifting noise he whispers, “I will lean on you again”. Tries to carefully nudge this flickering something onto the weary haze ahead of them.

In the old apartment, they shed shiny masks and arrange the clay figures on the shelf into maritime childhood scenes.  Their kneeled forms are only allowed to drink each other in the reflections.  They shift in the remembrance of what breathed.  It stings in both of their minds.  They used to swap sketches under this same tablecloth.  He left and silence swelled. 

But now he’s here and her hair is in his mouth.

The grassy plains had long given psalms to their blushing days.  Towers of love stood on a horizon only revealed to them.  Her paintings brought home to unfettered heights.  On the first rain that summer, their gleaming souls bled on each other. 

The final night shift before he left.  Cracks stretch on the mind’s track.  Steel is hung around him. A forest of presses, extractions, planes, and suspended rusting odes. 

It’s her on the bridge. Her on a glowing realm.  She came and he was at her mercy. It was the parking lot with her.  The holding of an ear to a crack in the wall with her.  The being a child with her.  The sharing of a basement with her.

Time’s knife falls the way it always does.  Here in the old apartment, Lily Briscoe and the colliding boy watch an icicle melt.

 

Garrett Milligan is a poet and photographer from the Midwest. He lives in Vermont. His writing is inspired by the fractured nature of memory and William Faulkner’s work.