WITH HER
By Judah Cricelli
Three is few,
One is two,
Her crease, and hue,
The halogen flickers when I am
With her.
Drips with dew,
Mud-freckled shoe,
Scuffed knees, hers too,
The playground goes silent when I am
With her.
Carpet is soft,
An ocean of polyester,
A pink pencil is splayed along its fabric tufts,
It rests there blunt, and worn along its edges when I am
With her.
The things left behind gather dust, some speckles of rust litter their dim, metallic husks,
And when I’m a few years older I will be
With her—
Even if that means digging her out of the ground—
And those terrible jokes that I wish I had told her will always remain, see, they’re bruised
On my brain,
My marketable skills include a chronic sense of pain,
A general disdain for the sound of the drain,
About thirteen cents and some off-brand champagne
And an ’04 sedan that leaks liquefied
Blackness as dark and abrasive as
My emptiness inside—
I hear it inspires remarkable synergy in the retail environment—
When
I am
Without her
Round-
-about her
Down and
Out her
Drown
And
Drought her
I am
Not
Who
I
Was
Before her,
Ignore her,
But gladder, someone far sadder,
Whose greatest failure was growing up and
Crowning achievement was discovering it’s not all that wonderful anyway,
As if knowing my As and my Bs and my Cs wasn’t hard enough,
Although now, that’s not so true because
T comes before U,
And there are twenty-something letters in the alphabet and the blackboard can only fit half of it but
Three is few and
One is two,
But
When
I
Was
With
Her—
That was all different
When I was
With her.
About the Author:
Judah Eli Cricelli, is a student currently enrolled in the second year of study at the University of South Australia. While psychology is his major field of study, he always finds himself coming back to poetry, a medium which can convey more truth about the human condition than the scientific method.
