How often do you think about us, when it was just us and not you and me?

How often do you think about the notebooks? Notebooks that we strapped with duct tape decorated with stars and rubber bands? They would hold mythical spells and the latest chapter of our new fantasy novel and elaborate plans for an eight-episode season of a TV show about magic musicians that we planned to both film and star in, which would never materialize.

Do you hear the notes like I do, a chord that feels unfinished, hanging in the air?

You said it yourself so eloquently so many years ago. I think it was maybe 2019, the edge of a growingly distant reality. Why do we talk so normally over the phone, but whenever we’re together in real life, we’re, well, awkward?

I want to go back to that pre-2020s clarity of mind, that clarity we lost through the pandemic of teenagerhood. I find myself, seemingly against my own will, reaching for my phone and scrolling through the scattered gallery of my post-thirteen-year-old life. I took so few photos for so long because a part of me was convinced it was a waste of time. Looking back at this era is like looking at the memories of a different person.

Suddenly I am transported to a summer evening in 2018—a lemonade stand propped up in front of my home. Me, my brother, sister, and you.

It’s funny, the way we don’t see the people around us age as we progress through time. You simply believe that you had always looked like that, with your pink tank top and mildly annoyed smile. We looked so alike on that summer evening in 2018 when we were so convinced we could get people to pull over on the side of the road and buy a red Solo cup filled with lemonade that we didn’t even make ourselves that’s been sitting in the Texas heat for probably two hours at least.

We were so in love with making those flimsy little Rainbow Loom bracelets out of vibrantly colored little rubber bands, the ones we could take and twist into our own patterns and designs. They’d fall apart with the slightest nudge but we were so proud of them, handing them to family friends and neighbors “at no extra charge” with their lemonade because we were growing worried at how many extras we’d have to give away before the sun fully set. We were so convinced we could make strangers listen to us, care about us, stop for us and buy what we were selling. Convinced we could get people to listen.

Pouches of flavored Zyn stuffed into McDonalds french fry baskets. Shiny new cars that will probably be wrecked by the year’s end. Photos of a shadow lounging in an eerie red glow. Images carefully curated on an internet shelf that part of me wants to knock over and let shatter at our feet to prove just how fragile it all really is. Is this all we are now, “L”? Photos to be seen from far away as if we weren’t the closest of friends, did everything together, as if we don’t live like fifteen miles from each other.

I miss us, I miss ours, I miss our notebooks when they were filled with sloppy colors and drawings and pages we numbered because we assumed we’d eventually write up to that page but we never did and now it’s just notebooks with page numbers scribbled in the corner that are otherwise empty, that will always be empty.

Do you also feel like you numbered the pages of your life before you could write them, or am I truly alone?

Sunken Ships & Glowing Gods

imagine our world
without the masts of shipwrecked cities.

they rise into the swirling soup of our sky 
and laughing at us like wine-drunk gods 
as we drown in their illusions,
caught in their wiry webs
of insidiously inviting glow.

imagine everything 
that reaches its hands to the sky 
as if to touch something. 

the trees rise up to face the sun, 
towards their god. 
the people lift up to see beyond the sun,
towards our god.

but what is the god of the concrete claws on the horizon? 
do they need anything but to tower over us?

imagine Jesus
crucified on a telephone pole.

excavatum

Dear God:

before I was born, did you plant
gold in my mother’s womb?
put treasure in my chest?

did it shine so brightly
that you hid it in me
so no one would see?

or, to you, is burying your love
too deep to ever show
a worse sin than hate?

has my body become
a self-conscious love letter
folded, hidden words of honey,

sweet sticky secrets that slowly spill
over strawberry-milk skies as i
wake from another dream i’ll forget?

bottle it up quickly, you tell me
to plant it into the dirt
and hope it grows a golden heart

but i beg you remember that
gold will never bloom:
it can only be unearthed. so

go ahead, excavate me.
find my treasure and kill me, too.
lift me from this earth and closer to you.

originally published in eleven40seven Fall 2025 edition

Do you remember the colors & how soft they were?

I remember blue, fading blue.

I remember stacks of worn-down blue classroom chairs in the corner of a musty old classroom lit with fluorescent lights. 

I remember hiding under the chairs as other kids danced and skipped in circles, shaking maracas and banging tambourines to the beat over some educational song for toddlers playing over the CD player Ms. Morley had on. 

I remember that I found their unbridled, unconfined joy alien and terrifying.

I remember orange, green, and yellow little pills giving way to deep, chocolatey brown.

I remember Grandpa Miller and the way the paper of his fun-sized M&M pouches he always brought would crinkle and tear in my tiny hands.

I remember the little strength I have nearly failing me on his funeral day, and worrying about how shameful it would be for a pallbearer to drop his casket.

I remember the dirty golds & greens of elementary school sandboxes.

I remember hiding with Kelsey in the playground tube slides. The sun filtered through the red and yellow plastic, setting our skin and hair aflame as we pretended to be dogs who were also spies infiltrating a secret base. 

I remember that Kelsey was held back in first grade and we slid apart; I’d reached the end of the slide and emerged in the daylight, but she was still playing in the colors and shadows.

I remember seeing my name on a poster in the corner of Ms. Davidson’s kindergarten classroom saying I was one of the select group of students who got to ride the bus home from school.

I remember I was so elated to finally be able to ride home with Brinley every day that I burst into tears when the teacher told me it was a mistake, even though it wasn’t.

I remember screeching streaks of yellow breaking through the fog.

I remember turning around on the bus to see Brinley poking her head over the seat, calling my name out coyly. “Over here, Sam.” I turned back around, and back again. Her face had advanced three seats closer to mine. “Hello, Sammy-Dammy.” I turned around again, trying not to laugh. Then she appeared next to me like a magician.

I remember that a few years later, she disappeared just as easily.

I remember in first grade a girl named Anastasia on that bus who punched me in the stomach when I couldn’t guess what the thing was that decorated her water bottle and started with the letter “E.” (Looking back, it might have been elephants.) 

I remember feeling a keen sense of injustice when all the teacher did was tell her “not to hit.” Not only was she not punished, but she was accused of the wrong thing, which felt just as bad.

I remember staring at the dragon boss in one of the video games I played the most and imagining him eating me. I don’t remember why I did that—I was, like, eight.

I remember asking my mom if men can marry other men after thinking for sure the phrase “Harold and his husband” was a misprint in my brand-new Captain Underpants book. She told me that God doesn’t approve of it and I shut up immediately.

I remember bursting into tears when my next-door neighbor Naya’s mother yelled at me when she found out that her daughter had given me what was probably an emotionally priceless family heirloom. I don’t even remember what it was, exactly; it was some kind of circular box that fit in the palm of her hand. I think she let me take it anyways. I feel bad to this day.

I remember water, grey instead of blue.

I remember bursting into tears when the swim instructor told me that my mother had explicitly forbidden me from eating the skittles the other students were entitled to after doing a good job in the pool, and that I was to have the jelly-beans they provided instead. I don’t remember why they were so special or what the big deal was. Give me my skittles, dammit, I might’ve said if given the vocabulary; I’d earned them, after all!

I remember being afraid of the holes in the edge of the pool that blasted bubbles, thinking they looked and sounded scary when I was under the water, like the mouths of little demons screaming at me.

I remember Travis and Wesley.

I remember being at someone’s house watching Ni Hao, Kai-Lan. I think it was Avery, the girl who Lexi said had a crush on me in kindergarten. We live in the same apartment at the same university now and I don’t think I’ve seen her once. Would we recognize each other if I did?

I remember in middle school being so surprised and flustered when this giant football player (who I thought was cute) smiled and waved hi to me in middle school when I didn’t think he knew who I was. So much so that I don’t think I said anything back. I must have looked antisocial or rude.

I remember hating who I was back then.

I remember all of these colors and more.

I feel my past falling around me now in the November rain that patters my shoulders like God’s tears of joy, and imagine for a second that I am the same way today, the colors just as gentle. I drink & drown myself in this delusion while wondering if it might be prudent to hold an umbrella.

momentary beauty, 
ephemeral bliss
i’d like to soak in the sun
and to always have this

yet 
time 
scatters
into the wind 
like dandelion seeds, 
a thousand never-ending 
promises 
that might someday 
grow and
bloom and
live all over again.

Maybe my mother is right
and this life is worth living.

i pray my days 
have sown 
a thousand seeds, 
touched a thousand lives, 
have spiderwebbed 
across the world,
a gossamer
of silk and snow 
i’ll never know

but 
in the end, 
i want to see 
my life’s 
shattered mirror 
bloom into 
a glass tapestry 
of everyone 
i hope to have saved