The snow melt
tastes of last November’s

silent lightening,
the blue air of Sierras.

This part of California sees
a constellation’s thrusted

hips. My north star is a muscular knee
cap. My skin is a surface.
My face

you dented like the granite bowls
of ancient rivers.

The water
turns me boneless—I want
you to take back your rib.

I’ll hold my air
in my plunged hands, and settle where
the earth wants to eat me,

minerals to
rust my insatiable desire

for shudder
of muscle launch, a frightened animal’s
heart, the pause
and the color of thunder
in memory,

for premonitions.

How deep I had reached
through your pauses, and
the stars on the belt:
the memory of snow fall
spun by trapped
heat, ghostly

like the bruise on my eye;

you, the boy who’d never seen ice,
whose father had died
before the blocks were shaped in mountains;

the airlessness
of my bones when I’m splayed in a place
invisible on any map.

—–

Kayla Eason is a prose writer, poet, and arts journalist from Northern California. Currently, she is an MFA candidate at San Francisco State University, recreational weaver and painter, and photography enthusiast. This coming spring, she’ll be teaching on topics of visual art theory in relation to the writing process, and explorations in contemporary and modern world literature. Her work has appeared in Transfer Magazine and the Redlands Review, for which she was awarded Best of Magazine.