summer is a 16-year-old boy. he has scabby, wobbly knees; strong yet turned weak with the burdens of identifying as one from this sickly town the dead arise from.
his bleeding lips crown jagged teeth and the bump on his nose houses a pair of glasses whose demise i’ll live to see next week. he swears he can tape it together, fix it. mend what’s broken. silly boy with his boyish tendencies that he is. does he not know the dead must remain dead? and the rotting corpses of 7-year-old boys and plastic lenses too?
he swears on all the mosquito bites on his arm ( 5 on his left forearm)
but he jumps into our towns quarry each sticky sunday and abandons civilization for human fervour along with… well, his glasses. there's a museum of their crippled bodies in my room somewhere.
tape washed away. water dilutes glue. the sun brightens his pale skin.
he never tans.
he likes to think he can heal me sometimes. all wishful thinking, of course. a bandaid never wore out a mother’s scorn. can holding his hand erase any doubt that i was ever loved ? he is the unabashed god of this town. carving our initials together on a tree was the sacrifice. i am the desperate devotee, sickle to the gooseflesh of my neck. he is a 16 year old boy: unabashed teenage god of this town.
what’s that with your nose again? I asked him once. why so crooked and long. did you cackle and boil children over bubbling pots of tartar in a past life? he cackles a witch’s glee. (beautiful boy.)
he is so sweet so soft so careful so tender so lovelovelvoeleoveloving to me. i wear his words sometimes. they stick to my skin like sweat on a summer night ( for is that not he? )
i clip them in my hair and slip them around my wrist. they whisper condolences during math class. ask to bum a smoke under the bleachers during gym class. they sing along during band practice. run their metaphorical hands through my hair in the silver moonlight where the teenage god makes me his teenage goddess
he tells me i look pretty.✶
The words esoteric, whimsical, and maybe a teensy bit obsessive come to mind when picturing the writer Amyuktha Karre (she/her). When she isn’t completely losing her mind over Sylvia Plath’s fig tree analogy, you’ll find her rambling nonsense on Tumblr, crying over bullshit poetry on Pinterest, and doing a not-so-pleasant-on-the-eyes-jiggy to Clairo’s music in her room.