I COULD HAVE BITTEN INTO THE SKY AND DRANK FROM IT IF I HAD KNOWN BETTER
The Aurora Borealis went to all the trouble to come down this far, and I saw nothing, clueless in my enclosure, at the karaoke bar, no feet in the grass, wide-eyed at the wrong things. Of course the hot rage of missing out comes in flares still, neon, whipping, radiating.
The primordial nature of the pink light juxtaposed with my sickly sweet yogurt soju Red Bull sips gleams, flowing through the spinning room, as I spit the blonde straw from my mouth when I can’t match the velocity of the way it all turns whether I want it or not–it all made me a little sick, the way I strayed from the stars and the ivy. If I had been given the date of the hearing where I pick a parent–the storm or the artifice–I like to think I would've shown up. It makes me feel full of all the wrong stuff, heavy with ache and humiliated. If we go through all the trouble to imitate life, is it transitively true, then, what they say? Does this flailing become art?
It becomes less of a way to cope and more of something real the longer I ponder it, transcendental chanting, joy getting in through the cracks without my permission. I bathed in the light of the erupting sun the morning after it got all that off its chest, and I, too, am pink and belong to everyone–the way I was at birth, the way I was when a song moved through me. I want to talk about the earth like she's a band I knew first. I want to talk about her like a girl who held me. I want to talk about her like I miss her and I'm so scared she doesn't miss me back because I do. I am.
A girl in a corset doesn't know me, but she knows something we could sing together. Maybe it's as old as time. Maybe it's from 2009. She doesn't know me so much as she knows I sprouted out of the same ground, spilled from the same starless night she did. I miss the phenomenon the laser lights were made to imitate, and I don't know it yet. The earth keeps spinning, dancing, holding, forgiving, under a pink sky.
Romy Rhoads Ewing, 27, California - USA ✯ IG: @romy.ewing.35mm ✯ romyrhoadsewing.xyz
“Romy Rhoads Ewing is a writer and photographer from Sacramento, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Querencia Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, Major 7th Magazine, persephone’s fruit, UC Davis’s Open Ceilings Magazine, and Genrepunk Magazine. Her debut chapbook, please stay, was published by Bottlecap Press in 2024. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Child Development from Sacramento State University, and also holds an Associate of Arts in Anthropology. She is currently studying Japanese.”