Glass by the River
You're five-six-seven-eight-nine years old.
You're running with scraped knees and a stick
retrieved from a mossy bank.
Your mom worries about glass by the river;
you collect it like the near-opaque shards
are thin, curved emeralds,
like the jagged neck of the bottle the fish avoid
is some faraway queen's crown
brought there by the languid waters.
You reinvent animal husbandry—
in a stained Tupperware you gather worms,
gather pill bugs, a slug or two,
with onion grass and dirt and dandelions
arranged like tiny furniture
and, mystified, see them multiply.
You move fluidly from running wild
through scraping branches
to sitting quietly in the shade
holding that Tupperware close
and naming each bug something silly.
Hubert.
Shoelace.
Applesauce.
You're ten-eleven-twelve-nineteen years old.
Can you ever feel that again, you wonder,
when you're too big for the bridges you built,
too tall for the tunnels?
Maybe—only maybe—
in the most afternoon of evenings,
when the sky is still bright and blue near dinner
as the sun bows to tall grasses.
Where it smells sharp, where
breathing stings and brings tears to your eyes
as if your body is mourning something
your mind has forgotten.
You close your eyes,
let those tears roll down your cheeks,
let your outside weep,
and, inside, rewind.
You're running with scraped knees and a stick
retrieved from a mossy bank.
Zoey Pincelli is a sophomore computer science major with English and mathematics minors. As a writer, she often focuses on crime fiction, sci-fi, and, of course, poetry! Her hopes for graduation are to pursue a career in software engineering while working on her novel-in-progress. Her publication through the Whiskey Island website will be her first.