Sky Davis: 4 Poems

Elevating Theory

When my new therapist asks me where
I think the hurt lives, I take seven seconds
to decide which answer will sound cooperative.
Then say, my chest. It is close enough.
Her hand makes a quick note of it and I wonder
if enough notes eventually become a person.
Perhaps there is a version of me on her desk
that makes more sense than the one sitting here
with my hands folded wrong. At the museum,
I stand in front of a restored fresco where the cracks
have been filled so carefully they disappear
unless I know exactly where to look. In another
room, a sculpture looks down at me with its right
hand intentionally absent. Why does nobody ask
what happened to it? At home, my mother asks
if I’m over it now. Over suggests above. Elevation
from the multitude of funerals inside me. In the
bathroom mirror, I examine a scar that has flattened
into a pale line, now tender and pink. I can’t remember
the pain exactly, only that it was convincing.

Loss of details, my therapist notes.
I don’t correct her. No one teaches I
how to talk without making others uncomfortable.
In a book my father gifted me, I underlined a sentence
and wrote “at what cost?” in the margin though I don’t
remember what prompted it.

The body continues regardless.
This is often mistaken for forgiveness.
What’s the deal with healing anyway.
Who becomes whole and brand new.
I couldn’t even decide which hurt
I don’t owe an explanation for.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

I sit at the edge of the café
because someone once whispered “forever”
and I could still taste the metal of it on my tongue.
Many times, unlike the rain or the streetlight,
it’s hard to recognize I am not a universe.
Maybe the heart is a hollowed-out tree,
or an impossibly blue sky keeping secrets.
But there are other things I do not know.

A whisper of jealousy might consume me,
or I might become the window instead,
watching bodies pass in pairs.
It’s terrible enough to sit alone in a crowded room,
far worse to measure love with a ruler.
So why aren’t we more careful naming it?
Many of the poems we write about love
are mirrors cracking slowly. The red ink
stains its own reflection.

Many times, the tongue talks back
with a voice not entirely human. Happy Valentine’s.
Why the mind decides to believe forever
after a single kiss is a riddle.
There are other things I do not know
and because the heart can break in silence,
I aspire to become a question.
There’s gravity in the feeling of a hand brushing mine.
In a minute the barista will spill coffee.
In a year I might find another poem.

Anywhere Would Do

It’s only past the Downcross Road
and the weeping-willow house that I realize
we are moving away from where we began.
I don’t know where that was
now that it seems everything has been in motion
since the beginning.

The guy in the seat ahead of me
is sharing biscuits with everyone.
Before he can look at me,
I turn my eyes to the window.
The treeline’s a bruised yellow,
it’s not exactly a line but not a curve either.
A few birds are circling above it.
I wait for them to sit on the transmission wire.
They don’t.

I’m about to ask someone what they’re called,
but the road has already taken us past them.
Stop, stop, stop.

(Stop what?)

We turn onto dirt. It’s getting dark.
I lean out the window and look back.
The birds are still flying. I
want them to stop.
Anywhere would do.
No one asks what I’m looking for.
When I look again,
there is nothing where the birds were.
I think I know this. Even though
what’s left of my thinking is thin.
I learned how to love
only after there was nothing to hold.

I Swear the Floor Moved First

Most afternoons, the tiny studio
looks like a circle—circling bird,
spirals of crows that don’t cry.
It’s the window that doesn’t stay put.
I see my sister counting the birds
each time a beetle or an ant crawls
up the window grill.
She likes loyalty being a little disloyal—
three cups, a broken door knob,
and two clocks that read each other different.

Phoebe says she can hear the radio
when she closes her eyes, even in her sleep.
What does it say, I want to ask her.
She doesn’t have an answer, never does.
I imagine the radio clearing its throat
when Phoebe snores, or maybe it hums
songs with glitchy productions all the time—
even worse.

My sister writes lists to make the day agree with her.
Milk. Keys. Don’t answer that.
The list argues back.
Crosses things out while she’s watching.
Adds items she didn’t invite.

People say trust your senses.
Aren’t we already betrayed by them?
My sister says the floor has shifted a few inches left
when we were baking cupcakes last week.
She broke the mirror that night. Later,
I saw her kissing her purple knuckles
over the glass smithereens.

Dreams sneak contraband into daylight.
I wish I could teach her how to count what stays.
There’s a map in her room that has a sketch
of our old house. A revise, mostly.

She says the walls lean closer at night.
They’re tired from all that fighting, I say.
We’ve been practicing ordinary sentences lately:
pass the bowl, hold this, it’s fine—
I wish they were little spells. Spells that worked,
or at least knew how to if spoken gently enough.

The street behaves outside. As much as it can.
Cars are passing without any commentary,
thank god, the moon’s minding its business too.
It’s in the inside where everyone has a fucking opinion.

I stand guard where my sister sleeps.
We made tteokbokki today, but she didn’t eat.
Said, it doesn’t have enough colors in it.
Of what, I want to ask. She snores.
I know she knows the answer to this.
I wish I did too.

Sky Davis is a young writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brilliant Flash Fiction, fifth wheel press, Amsterdam Review, Pinhole Poetry, electric pink, and other small corners of the internet.