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Zaila Alves Poem
Zaila.
Can’t make a Nickname out of that,
But oh you can,
Super-Z, you ‘member that.
I rather not,
There isn’t much to remember,
I didn’t live much.
Oh, but that coffee table,
Mhm, yeah, I know the one,
The one I’d play dolls under with my cousin,
With Barbies too big to fit in my toy car,
Then you remember how dark It’d get in that living room?
Mhm,
Just lamp in the corner of the room, light
Barely kissing the opposite walls
Letting the blue filter in
The blue?
Yeah, when the sun would hit my eyes and make them
Look almost as beautiful as a pair of blue ones for a moment,
And then wrap itself in its dark, blue blanket
I..I can’t remember what shade it was
But it’d cover everything,
Even the crisscrossing wires
And when it got really dark?
The streetlights.
When they lived upstairs,
The streetlights were orange.
The streets were orange too,
It felt special, didn’t it.
Yeah,
Like the streets would always look orange,
And soft, and old
Now you spend hours on Google Maps—
Looking at old pictures of my house
From when the fence was wooden and broken down
And the yard was nothing but grass
And the pile of sand in front of the garage
The gray garage.
The gray house.
The freshly put-together first-story porch.
The sagging second-story porch.
Where my cousins lived,
Where I lived
Under the coffee table?
Under the orange lights.
But in the house?
But in my house.
You wish you lived in the maps
I wish I could live in those old photos all over again,
I miss you.
Me too
Me too.
Copyright © Zaila Alves | Year Posted 2025
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