Dearheart, you’re not the person I walked with. It isn’t you in this blurred polaroid. Remember: I learned your lips one evening, only that one. How did you become yarn crisscrossing a room I can’t help visiting? I still trip over what I couldn’t love, what I might have loved, what I still love. How many times will our fingers trace these lines and barely miss each other? Nothing exists now that we can touch. The spaces I was were never yours, except for now. Do I thank you for the gift of intangibility? I would rather be crystal than fossil. Can you find my facets and keep me from calcifying? I can never say what I mean when I talk to you.
Letter to an old friend (who might contain my younger self)
Last updated on December 6, 2021
Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet and editor from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (Treaty 6 territory), where she lives with her family and a judgmental tuxedo cat named Miss Bennet. Many years ago, she got a B.A. in linguistics that she currently uses to write love poems. Her work has appeared in Prairie Fire, Moist Poetry Journal, and You are a Flower Growing off the Side of a Cliff: a chapbook about mental health and resiliency (League of Canadian Poets chapbook series). Her first chapbook, unless you’re willing to evaporate, is available through Prairie Vixen Press. She often tweets micropoems and creative encouragement as @milkcratejess.
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