BORNE

Ari is alone in a field.
The grass is damp,

The sun shines fuzzy and white
Behind the clouds.

Ari breathes deeply in through her nose,
Cross-legged on the ground,

Both hands over her heart.
In the air is a musk,

A high sweetness that turns
To featureless cold by the time

It hits her throat.
Winged bugs halo the flowers

Strewn about the field-
Puffy yellow flowers,

Slender faint-purple flowers, white flowers
With golden cyclops eyes.

Beyond the field, behind Ari’s back,
A brook gargles, clear-cold water

Smoothing the pale stones along which it runs
(Time doing more smoothing than the water).

Dark, indistinguishable little insects
Fleck Ari’s bare legs;

She thinks to herself that they look like pepper.
She sits like this,

Frozen in the cosmos she carries around
Inside her head, imagining herself

To be a pure and unbroken wall of awareness.
Perhaps not imagining at all.

None of it belongs to me, she thinks.
The way my mind forms it, pictures it-

That’s the only thing I own. And even then, she thinks.
And even then.

It is all so inconceivable.
God, that I feel these wires

All through me.
God, that the wetness of this grass stains me,

God, that the wings of these bugs make sound.
Tears begin dribbling one after another

Down the bulb of Ari’s cheek
And something unseen wipes them.

I will return, she says.
I will return and I will turn around

And I will look back and remember everything.

---

Jacob Lawless, 19, Virginia - USA ✯ IG: @_jacob_lawless_ ✯ BACK TO POETRY: OUROBOROS

“I was born in Tennessee in 2003. I am currently pursuing a Humanities major at Bluefield State University. I have never been professionally published. Fiction and poetry have been dear to me for quite literally as long as I can remember. I hope to one day write full-time.”