Return to Magic

COHORT 4

a Cento after the 2021 COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective Writing Fellows

The summer of empty telephone static left

my heart, open on the porch swing where blackbirds split 

walnuts like every hopeless poem I fought 

& lost. It was the summer of drivers licenses: hazy

ballads & passports to autumn, none of them mine—

the summer I discovered a walnut’s inky shells 

were no match for the shy fledglings encased inside.

On my neighborhood shore, I coughed up 

all the loves I could not bring myself to swallow. 

What I knew of love: a fruitless seed 

watered by the tears of the teak tree. 

How it always lodged itself in the wrong yard, 

planting saudades against memory’s windows. 

Before I tumbled into my new life, I carved open 

my entry wound as a childhood memory, 

cried until the emergency dispatch drowned out

all of July’s bloodless wrath. Doctors prescribed

pills, powders, pixie dust. Medicine to substitute for time.

Now, in September’s dying sizzle, I stir leftovers

of my faraway suburbia into Manhattan’s milky air.

In time, I’ll learn to call the metropolis home, 

learn its webbed gridlines & pulsing sirens.

Once upon a time, I wanted these sleepless city nights 

the way a child wants a fairytale to last forever. 

See: to believe in magic, I had to marry my dreams,

marry any prophecy of success beneath the city sky.

So when I visit The Land of Stories once more, 

there are no longer myths & mountains of light

but rather the magic they preserve. This is not goodbye, 

for as long as there are seasons to sit on the porch swing 

& cast spells in stories, like symphonies.