August Reid
Collin Passes Away in April
and we haven’t spoken in years. I remember us, children of heat, sagebrush, bloodless tomatoes peeling until they’re wrinkled organs. Our snow-chapped cheeks after our only winter, both of us drowned in white. Wet socks and rubied knuckles. Cold is for the faint of heart, a preservation masked as burning. He said it like the sand and sweat were still caverning the arroyo of his throat. Our grandfather would crush ripe plums in his hands, just to watch bruise-colored
life lake his palms. We knew love as a drying. As a hollowed cacti pecked by wren. As a beautiful peach just above the drought. I wish we could be more than a begging. I wish for more flesh and words, and some pulsing cold to hold us whole, even if it would only dissolve our withered skin. I bury Collin, waiting for showers, cracked, crumbling knowing the green underneath.
Our Front Yard, While Our Father Dreams of Elsewhere
We hold a praying mantis in our palms. The body of leaves. Thick, combed limbs and sour grapes you insist we must mother. As if mothering were only a soft underbelly, an empty swing set, an affection to be birthed of bitterness. Much later, I will think of you while chopping celery for your daughter, your chipped mirror. Peach pit eyes and all the same hunger.
Mustering gentleness, we swaddle the mantis in a cardboard box. Light it like a sewer grate with pencil-punctured holes. We stuff it with marshmallows, milkweed, and all the things we can’t give ourselves, build a cradle from an empty cigarette carton.
When the insect dies and all that’s left is thrumming, folded, fetal bodies, and the midnight welts under your eyelashes that could only be described as worship, I tell you the praying mantis eats its young. And you move like all bleeding things, a desperate yearning stuck between your ribs. I wonder if you could feel the soft teeth scraping your veins, the starving animal inside, when you say at least to devour is to keep is to love.
Halloween, 2004
We hide in the dust-scattered light of our grandmother’s sunroom and Collin dresses as a mermaid. Over his T-shirt, a blue sequin bra filled with wrapping paper, knobby knees kneaded by blushed spandex. Glitter kisses our skin, we’re a disco ball, a deep-sea fish bathing gold. He swirls like memory, like all the bubbling we were before, laughing loud, a sunset reaching his warm, pinked hands into blue.
Tomorrow, we’ll shed this giddy glory under stained glass and feel the thorns scrape our tongues. But for now, his eyelids flutter under my fingertips. For now, we learn how jellyfish float in time, spineless, how confetti is most exciting once it hits the ground.
I won’t lose heart while our outer selves waste away. Light is momentary, but affliction is the rushing water in your chest you can’t drain out. To be unseen is to be transient, fleeting. To see is eternal.
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August Reid (they/them) is a writer and artist from Rio Rancho, New Mexico. They received their bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature from Arizona State University and are currently an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University. Their work appears in Blue Mesa Review, Hunger Mountain, and Five on the Fifth. August loves constellations, a good queer rom-com, Doc Martens, and their cats, Raspberry and Ophelia. They are at work on a novel.