there was a little playground behind the school where you told me to meet you, but once i got there you werent anywhere in sight. i dont know if you just decided to not show or if you were there earlier and left but either way i spent the night with just myself and the starry reflections of my past lives. they called me a fool for listening to you but thats besides the point mostly they just wanted to know if you and i were still together. not in a dating sense more like if we were still the same person because the more i looked at them the more they saw that i was growing fainter so they came closer so i got fainter so they came closer so i nearly disappeared. they said i had to catch you. but isnt it in fairytales you who usually catches me? i dont know. i hate always being behind you with your foot on my leg and always blocking people from seeing me. maybe im better off without you, maybe this is how i was always meant to be seen. maybe youre the shadow and im the reality of thoughts minds personalities dreams and embodiments. maybe youre even less real than i am.
by B. Sakura Cannestra
If you1 don’t see any2thing3 to adore8
Will I4 be5come something6 to now7 abhor8
forward
backward (or embodiments)
1you, the idea, in that you are just as indefinable; you await in the window as a cap between what I will be and what you will lose because there isn’t a difference between you and i and the loss; we’ll meet at a shop, perhaps Strada or somewhere close, and it’ll be as shady as an embargoed tip; i’ll hold my tongue while you speak; you are you and everyone else and me and you and again
2The world’s expanse is too broad to define. Have you ever considered the reach of your actions? Internally, externally, or eternally?
3Cannestra, Berkeley Sakura. “It.” In BS. San Jose: 1998.
4i dont recognize you anymore Read at 02:46 a.m.
5before, beguiling, berkeley, bedridden, becoming, benevolent, bedlam, belly, benchmark, best, bedazzled, bent
6 is wrong. There is something wrong. There is something wrong.
7If a habit of falling in forests is never heard, does the habit truly happen regularly enough to be called a habit? If I question your intents enough, will you follow through with your promises? I’ll keep waiting at Wheeler, or maybe near Eshleman or even the office on Hearst, if you remember where the news desk is. It’s at the very back. What are you? Who am I? And what will you come back home to? Where even is home if you come back so late?
8A girl stands in her blue dress, sequins glittering like stars in the moonlight, like the tears that drip down her cheeks. Now she just wants to please herself, hide in the bathroom with her phone, but you’re demanding an answer. Not from him or her, though. Why won’t you say I am beautiful? Aren’t I pretty enough? Aren’t I finally good enough? It is prom night and she’s ditched her date on the dance floor because, in the darkness, he was touching her where she’d already said no. She wants to throw up and you, the child, in the bathroom mirror just watches as she shatters into one million reflecting stars. Is this what the mirror looks like, has it always had that weird reddish hue? What are you? Her bits will speckle the world for the rest of her memory, and all she’ll know of this moment is that your dress doesn’t fit anymore, like the name she discarded when she entered college. Or maybe, one day, her mind will tell her something new and say that the dress does fit. Maybe one day she’ll get to say yes to the dress. Who knows. Not her. She doesn’t know anymore. She doesn’t know anything anymore. She doesn’t even know her name.