The First Spark
- One girl and one boy:
- just talking, then falling.
- Suddenly, her dorm room feels
- too small, two souls peeled
- clean and raw, like copper wires
- stripped, electricity whipping
- silent sparks, dancing and daring,
- as faces flush and legs brush,
- spellbinding and scaring,
- Until the skin becomes trained
- to crave those shocks like the flame
- that keeps a hearth cozy and warm
- even during the coldest of storms.
Crash and Burn
- I stare down at blistered
- skin now branded by the oven
- days after he cremated my heart.
- Both accidents, I suppose,
- from heat, hypnotic as fireflies:
- the smell of baked cinnamon hugging
- my nostrils or sparks from a
- stray thumb tracing my thigh.
- At age eight, I dreamed of soaring into space
- but I didn’t spy stars in his eyes —
- I found the sun, so bright it stings, scorching
- my wings. Until I
- fall.
- Like the tray of cookies,
- when hot steel kisses flesh.
- The tray doesn’t shatter at impact.
- I do.
WHO AM I?
- If my soles rooted into the ground,
- I’d reign over ’Carolina hills
- without a sound
- ’til the night it/I screamed,
- struck — by lightning now bound
- with bark in a splintered
- scar — but not struck down.
- Under lights of the city,
- I am a telephone pole tailored
- in the skin of that tree/me.
- It/I always buzz, so busy
- recording strangers’ lives
- with ink or electricity
- because stolen words sound
- less wooden
- than my choppy journal entries.
- Dancing along both trunks,
- another it/me I’d find: a squirrel
- hoarding dreams like domes of pine.
- Most seeds strangle on dirt and die
- while a few bloom and multiply (much
- like one simple question planted
- this poem of mine).
- Perhaps if nature acts as my mirror,
- even once my soul withers,
- in an it, I can reappear.
Casey Cromwell has published poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction in Point Loma Nazarene University’s literary magazine, winning third place for poetry during her sophomore year. She also writes a successful blog (caseythecollegeceliac.blogspot.com) and has written for Further Food, Beyond Celiac, and San Diego Writers, Ink. She is currently a senior writing major at PLNU.