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Leah Stallings Poem
ALUMINUM SIDING
my heart is buried behind the aluminum siding,
trapped inside that bubbly feeling i’d get when your arms would graze my waist,
in the late night bus rides when the light slipping through the shutters swathed your smirk in soft, blazing bandages.
you called me darling back then.
why won’t you call me darling again?
your love was scrawled between ink splotches, inside hugs and eyebrow raises,
while i thought it was too timid to beat its way out of your rib cage.
why didn’t i see where everything was hidden sooner?
my metamorphosis into something more unhinged began the day i left you.
and with you, i left everything i love behind.
you twirled saturn’s rings around my fingers
and scribbled possums on sticky notes that i treated as love letters, hiding them in scratched phone cases and backpack pockets, carrying your heart on my sleeve, mushed in with chewed erasers and tangled earbuds.
so now i walk the heartwrenching path of least resistance away from you,
but it’s not the path around the aluminum siding we used to take.
Copyright © Leah Stallings | Year Posted 2022
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Details |
Leah Stallings Poem
“love is just passion that can turn.”
sometimes i wonder when people will tire of taking care of me.
when my mother’s lilting sighs will lengthen as she dabs at my grape juice finger paintings splattered over a white dress like wretched purple stars over a drained sky,
and my sisters will watch my broken bones rock and whisper behind prison bar fingers, “oh, it’s happening again.”
when they'll really look at the hundreds upon thousands of zeroes, surrendering stars smacked on my bedroom wall, dangling like hanging heads,
tokens of my inherent worthlessness, silent soliloquies echoed by lulls and sighs
people are careless.
i’m surprised they paid attention to my scatterbrained symphony this long.
to the screaming siren song in my ears, the cherubim swimming and sulking behind a presidio of taped up tulips.
i wonder when they’ll realize that the only reason i romanticize everything is that my life has turned to crap.
my life is a jumble of shriveled flowers buried in sheets of tulle and crinkled tissue paper.
this world will never be changed.
i am not a mosaic of ivory, nor gold. this is not my life. this is the only aesthetic facet of my demented, crushed heart that i present.
i’m incapable of communicating with others, so i communicate my beauty with the world.
with you.
thank you for not tiring of me yet.
Copyright © Leah Stallings | Year Posted 2022
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