by Skya B., 16
White machines, white sheets, white shoes,
I study my grandfather’s face,
piercing blue eyes surrounded by engravings from the sun.
I listen to the suck and pull of the oxygen. In. Out.
I match my breath to his just like when he taught me to swim,
dunking my head beneath the water,
and learning to take enough of a breath to remain Earthbound.
The burning sensation that reminds you of where you belong,
Stay down too long, and you may never come up.
I study the book on his bedside table: “A Treasury of Poems,”
I trace the annotations in blue pen.
This is why I write,
to remind myself of sensitivity and kindness,
that I am grateful to feel things,
to know them,
to lose myself in new horizons,
but the smudged ink, always an enemy to grace,
wraps her tendrils around the stoney edge of my mind,
pestering my soul’s fugue.
A murky and fragile string of notes that represents the entirety of my being,
not watered down; not twisted; not bent; not conformed; not logical;
but a cluster of cells and poignancy,
in this nematocyst called memory,
all of my warped fantasies and recollections have a home.
There they lay,
forever a slave to sensitivity and absurdity
on this lined piece of paper.
Wall, New Jersey
Bridge Ink 