Alexis Sears
Sky, You Don’t Get It
You could place your hand in a ripe fruit and withdraw a beautiful afternoon.
-Kenneth Koch
I’m learning something every ravishing day
and none of it is easy. I admit
my former self has drifted miles away.
I’m fortunate my loved ones seem to stay
with me (I’m sure it’s rough). They never quit.
I’m learning something every ravishing day.
The sky is prettiest on sad days, way
too beautiful to understand this shit.
My former self has drifted miles away,
though sometimes it returns. It’s so cliché
to have some strange internal screaming fit.
I’m learning something every ravishing day:
my lush best friend could end someday (we say
she’ll end instead of die). Fed up, she’ll split,
her former self drifting, drifting away,
her eyelid wings now on her back, betray
our tenderness. She won’t, though. She’s got grit.
I’m learning something every ravishing day
about my former self, miles away.
Riding Home, Five Years Later
I’m a high school senior and my brother,
age sixteen, drives us home in our black Prius,
his eyes half-closed like clams shells, while his hands
narrowly graze the wheel. Turning left,
he’s almost catatonic in his post-
exercise stupor. Neither of us speaks.
Occasionally, he tugs at his shirt
that reads Peninsula High School Baseball, sweaty
and clinging to his chest. A 90s hit
blares from the stereo, a song I’ve always
dodged. Sometimes, the trumpets make me cry.
Hey, Chris? I ask him. Do you ever miss
our dad? I’ve been thinking about it, and
I get so sad. He squints. I picture them
in Dad’s apartment, gnawing frozen waffles
and undercooked potatoes. Late night hoops
on Peck Park’s basketball court. I look at my
young brother, wonder how he can be so
strong, yet in this moment, microscopic.
Silence. Then he stammers, Do you want
a chocolate malt? I’ll buy you one. I shake
my head, feel myself parting from my body.
The car gets smaller and smaller till it’s gone.
Alexis Sears reads “Sky, You Don’t Get it”
Alexis Sears reads “Riding Home, Five Years Later”
Alexis Sears is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, and she earned her MFA in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was a 2019 Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholar. Alexis’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cimarron Review, Hopkins Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Able Muse, and elsewhere.