dear anne with the broken fingernails

 

 

when elsewhere the weather is what you want

there’s that feeling of the world happening

without you where breathing feels

a little less reciprocal

 

one summer my nails

packed black with silt dug from the creek

behind the pool where girls grew cruel

to everything

 

we named sandbars

after states like Mississippi named rearranged

rocks mutually beneficial like we did

everything we used

 

feral dared each other

rend the heads off crawdads with your teeth

spit out the skull in the dip of time

before the spindly body knew to bleed

 

the rocks being rocks didn’t know

how easy it was to drown without water

 

in the shallow and the soft

parts I let the penny taste nip the corners

of my mouth

 

like the water was mine and the truth

is we tell ourselves the splitting of heartbeat

sounds isn’t a symptom but the stitches

our lungs need to hold themselves together