Passing

Oliver Smith, England

Seasons of salt and sugar melt off heated tongues—

Those chipped teeth summers drowned with rainbow puddles
of ice-cream fallen off their sticks onto the hot cement sidewalk
opposite Century Park. They send us off on two-wheels, into the future,
brave to leap, and brave to fall, and brave to stand up with
bruised knees and uncut hearts.

Springs of brave confessions, light green with buds of naivety,
curl into themselves with shades of dark emerald envy- coiled tight
desperate to bloom. Bursting forth now, angelic whites and sun-kissed yellows,
reaching out to be plucked, ready to leave between calloused fingers,
eager to be picked.

An autumn arrives with fiery chariots, deep red leaves of bloodshed.
Starkest changes are always molten- we strike while the iron is hot-
picking our best bits out of glowing embers. Our fingers burn, hearts charred
enough to harden, a black cocoon encasing crimson flesh, raw as the day we were born.

Winter. It was a white Christmas, I remember, a cocoon of frost-
silent and still, a chill distilled from the remnants of the year gone by.
Trance unbroken, the days segued into weeks,
snowflakes waltzing lightly down, the sky aquiver with anticipation.
Tabula rasa. We begin again.

Oliver is a 21-year old aspiring writer with a love for fiction.