izzy

sketches for my sweetheart the drunk
5. If you could run your hands through like water runs, would you stay? If you could whip your hair like wind whips, you would stay.

*

sarah

it’s a Wednesday
and he sits, arms fixed at his side
knees pressed into his forehead
breathing into the space between his legs
watching the soft blonde hairs shiver with every exhale.
he is halfway up the spiral stairs exactly
the wood smelling of varnish and leather
and the sun spilling resinous light through the air
he presses his eyes against the plates of his knees
until he sees red, then white, then neon green
upstairs, behind thick closed doors
his father shuffles papers, and beats at a typewriter
wreathed in a fog of frowning thick cigar smoke
downstairs, his mother clatters pans in the sink
and shushes at them sharply like a spitting goose
he can feel in his pocket the soft little lump
of the mouse that he’d killed, as it chirped in his bedclothes
chattering away about its little furred day
and in the half-sleep of morning, he’d panicked and lunged
and dashed it by the tail on the floor of his room
til its head seeped a little, and its squeaking grew still
and now he sits, grief-frozen and shamed
halfway between his parents, nursing a little round burden
and feeling old as the world, and sad as he knows how

*