The Creek
There is a creek that flows through my mind, running along a bed of soft mud and lapping at fir covered banks
Years ago it might have frozen over in the winter, or become bare and dry in the heat of summer, but it is too deep now
The river grows fuller with each of your caresses, deeper and more swift when you take my hand in yours. It swells as you run your lips across my knuckles, when I feel your breath gentle on my neck
It’s a gentle thing that soothes in the summer, that carries your voice into my dreams as I drift asleep, but this forest is a fitful and greedy place that wants more love than it can sustain.
The river swells into rapids, into a torrent that claws at its own bed and banks in hunger
It rushes forth with such force that I fear it will burst forth through me, through my eyes and my chest and the beds of my fingernails
That it will crush delicate things, flow forth through the streets carrying roots and stones and cars
That it will sweep you away from me
How I fear being something you fear, being something reckless and brash and greedy
Being something you pity or loath
Writhing into myself like a spider curling as it dies
But this rushing love is such that no dam I build will contain it
Perhaps it is fear that drives this water forth, for it knows it has a mirror that through the fog of bone and skin it cannot see.
If my love is big enough for two then it doesn’t matter if your creek is small and slow enough to freeze. My heart will be eroded with the strain, and you will remain dry, but we will both have enough to drink.
That’s the thing about love, I suppose, that makes it quite so vulnerable: You can only feel your own.
I get brief flashes of the pressure within you, the cool water and silken mud beneath your feet, see the pools behind your eyes, under the beds of your fingernails, in the hollow spaces between your breaths and the gentle crease of your eyebrows.
But the rest I cannot see, the rapid or river or trickle that carves its path inside your mind. To know the rest, I suppose, I have to trust.
I hope there is something behind your eyes that can sweep away cars and crush delicate things. I hope it laps at its banks gently and brings you relief from the heat of summer. I hope it runs fast enough not to freeze.
I hope there is a tempest formed in the empty space when I am gone, calmed only by the gentle brush of lips against the backs of my knuckles.
Copyright © Ilaria Hobbs | Year Posted 2026
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