The Laughing Medusa '17

Page 22

Cousins

Something Has Occurred

We are walking to the Isle of Avalon. You are beside me, eight years old, and covered in chocolate ice cream. We hold hands and the grass is cool against our bare feet.

I am the place in which something has occurred

Arthur gives us glasses of water. A firm pat on the head He sends us home. We are walking to the Isle of Avalon and you are thirteen, a few steps ahead of me. I watch your back and wish my body was not hard but curved like yours. The knights doze around Arthur, curled tight like a fiddlehead. I am alone the next time I walk. Eighteen, with newly shorn hair, I want to wield Ex Caliber take it to family Christmas parties where you will be jealous. The sword is heavy and Arthur sleeps. I trudge back to school. We are twenty-one and happen upon Avalon by chance. We drink wine out of jeweled goblets and laugh. We are women sharing the weight of Ex Caliber between us. Celia Cummiskey

I am a body
 Of strings and clumps of cells
 Piloted by a mind
 Seeking direction
 I am the cheeks, once stained pink at your touch
 And the eyes
 Pierced with a soul that you called beautiful. I am the hair that you compared to honey
 and the hands small against yours
 and the forearms that you tested between your fingers to determine whether I was more than imagined.
 But I am not your favorite character
 To be loved, a fascination then placed back on the shelf until the next adventure
 I am the hero of a story that you didn’t carve
 and this body
 has lived
 Even when you have misplaced it Because these cheeks
 turn pink when I laugh
 At a joke you didn’t make
 And these eyes shine
 like the ocean before the rain
 but not the one you showed me; it’s my own And this hair
 has been twisted
 and chopped
 and torn far longer than you have admired it And these hands
 are meant to twirl pencils
 and someday hold a hand that isn’t yours And these lips
 are untested and untraced
 parted with words that you haven’t heard

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