Sunrise

Art by Sandi Shao

Is this what these years should be?

Thigh scraped from the hard plastic of my windowsill

pressing cruelly into my leg as slide across it slow

and drop into the dirt

I watch the sleepless neighbors through glowing boxes

and see their stuttering lights in the sky

Hold a firefly between my fingers and breathe in

a smile and a light feeling

I am lifted by a million glowing things

My foot is half asleep by the time he’s here

The man too old to be sneaking around like this

(or maybe just old enough––it seems like

we’ve all been growing backwards

Undoing systematic knots in our chests and bones

tugging at them like pocketed tangles of earbuds)

We want to blast the music

I whisper to him as though we’ll never see daylight

And that’s what this is

isn’t it?––

the last chance before dawn

to ignore the difference between source and shadow

to be nothing but one of a million silhouettes

No shoulds or plans or consequences––just

holding a near stranger in my arms

A smile and a light feeling

As the birds begin to sing I ask if he remembers

the lark and the nightingale

he does

But we are not star crossed and the night is no tomb

so he kicks off his skateboard

and I bruise my other thigh on the belligerent window

I wonder how the whispering brightness

now spilling over the lawns in blue gray

grew from the electric darkness of

just a lifetime ago

I doubt that all inevitable things are so beautiful

#growingup #younglove #teen #poetry #romance #romeoandjuliet #sunrise