SOMETHING LOST, SOMETHING BLUE

Escaping cheers and a flashbulb from the damp churchyard,
We sailed five giddy miles down the M62 in your red Ford Cortina
And giggled to find a flurry of rice at the toe of my white squared heels.
Parked beside a marbled field, we sent it in free trajectory towards a dry stone wall
But lost it in a misty furrow of the veiled horizon.

In the polaroid of you stooped to my grandmother’s height,
Laughing at the same lines as if they are new,
Your jacket folds fan-like to the will of your spine–
A lithe bow arching, an easy spring ready
As you help prune March rose shrubs in the mid-morning sun.

When muddy fields have gone all to frost,
We’re sure to wash the evergreen in silver prickled swirls:
The same lines again, the television pandering on the periphery
As we wonder where we’ve tossed the kids’ pipe cleaner angels
And complain of our cooled tea on the crowded coffee table.

After we’ve scraped the jam jar clean, and all the seeds are eaten,
You’ll shuffle somewhere to mend the old sitting room lamp.
In the four-o’clock haze through the kitchen sink curtains,
I’ll fight to peel its label off in one piece, tearing a thumbnail
As the diamond glass winks dully in the clutch of my hand.

And entrenched in green echoes on each sleeping street,
We’ll start at a scurrying oak leaf at long summer’s end
And wonder how it has crumpled so soon–
And where it’s come from,
And when.

TWO WORMS FORGED WITHIN AN APPLE

Something ripe and barely red shifted on a sheet of earth:
You could have smelled it had it been twice its mass,
This solid, perfect volume of a neglected trajectory.
There is no unconcealed doorway, no pinprick into the core, and yet
The writhing lump betrays the beings inside.

Suffocatingly, they fail to circumnavigate the tumbling five-seed star,
Burrowing each in their own hemisphere, 
Tunneling in languid parallel beneath the bruised skin–
Hatched in a vestibule of nourishment, yet longingly 
Oblivious to the exhales of the other. 

And will they happen fatedly to consume the same space of flesh, 
Charting an axis point into the corresponding pocket void?–
Or else, perplexed at the waxy glow from the membrane above,
They’ll snip a cell to startle out at a plane of mottled things,
And blinded separately, protest to the horizon,
“I shall retreat alone again into my rotten cavity.”

Macrina Forest is a literary studies major living in Chicago with four rescue cats. Her work has been featured in Creating Knowledge: The LAS Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship at DePaul University. In addition to creative writing, she enjoys doing digital photo restorations and colorizations, getting lost in online museum archives, and making sketches of people that she finds interesting.