by Damian Kelly
when we met I didn’t know I could speak two languages, and now that you’re gone I’m not sure I ever could
when I am sixteen I will cut my hair and I’ll
watch it fall and fill a dustpan in the corner.
it will be the same color as the grass on the soccer field during
the april when we will meet, a brittle straw-yellow.
when we meet in april, we won’t speak much which
isn’t to say we won’t communicate.
you will watch my fingers lace up my shoes, and my
hands will find your waist during 1 v 1.
when we play, you will hip-check me, and I will wedge
my body between the ball and your body, that is to say I
will make an excuse for my body, and you will look me
in the eye when you drink from my water bottle.
when I am sixteen we will redefine first touch and
settling and finishing. our one-touch becoming two-
touch, and when I cross it to the top of the box I know
you’ll be at the end of it, rattle the upper ninety.
when we meet in april, we won’t know that we won’t last
long enough to see the grass turn green in july.
we’ll just sit back to back while we pull off our shinguards
our bodies aching like they know something we don’t.
the world doesn’t render til noon
what will become of us, we who pound flat gravel in the night of the early morning? we who run ourselves hamstrung in the light of the harvest moon as the sun rises, stepping on the toes of our shadows as we fly into the pinkening sky, tearing holes through the light of the infrequent streetlights, sweat melting sweet into our hair?
and what will we look like through the bitter pane of memory, marching our silence into dewy grass?
know this:
the shape in the field was hunched like us, cast a shadow like us, tilted its head like us, and we did not speak of the figure in the mist-fog until we got close enough to see that it was not like us, made of straw.
if saying it makes it so, saying it makes it so, saying it makes it impossible to pretend you weren’t just a little bit afraid of the scarecrow crouching.
maybe this is the last time we ever run like this for the rest of our lives, and what a tragedy to know the first and the last are one in the same, folding into each other like paint on the palette of the sky.
the world tears people like us apart, people with so little in common, and if the fact of being together isn’t enough, we’ve sown a thread through the loops of our shoes, we’ve synced the scratch of rubber smooth cement down to the metronome.
softly clicking until the incline of the hill soaks itself orange in the light of the day, and the stalks of grass in the field off the shoulder of the gray gravel road tip themselves yellow as brushes. and still the panting, still the ache in the side like an arrow, still the snaking venom of reaching the top of something tall, dust and sweat making mud of our shins.
this is infinite, this fleeting moment, and we are infinite, we fleeting moments.
we have become irremovable from history, even as we are forgotten, there can be no denying as the sun rose and harvest moon set, as we scattered morning mist and kicked up dust in its place, as we forced our bodies through the warming air, we were here, and we were infinite.
we were here, and we were infinite
by Damian Kelly
lead
when i was young, i pricked my thigh with a pencil,
and i thought i was going to die.
because i was too young to know about graphite
and just old enough to know about lead.
it left a stain like a birthmark
and this was my first tattoo.
this was before a nickel allergy
stained my earlobes.
this was before knowing how short I was or
how very long i’d have to be alive for.
flash forward to me, unwrapping the
wood from a number two, chipping
the paint off the walls, tying lead weights to
my ankles, flash forward to me, hoping it
looks like an accident when i don’t float
back to the surface.
they say it’s the basest metal,
heavy and slow and
absolutely deadly. they say it
turns you heavy and slow and
absolutely dead.
i wish i had turned a little more bitter i
wish i had turned a little more red-
rimmed, wild-eyed, bleeding-lip mad i
wish i had turned a little more hard and
terrible. i wish i was more than just
soft
MJ Szalay is an 18 year old student at Grinnell College. She has also been published in Grody Magazine and Cavity Magazine. Her favorite chord is Cadd9.
Damian Kelly lives on a Hill Farm in Scotland, he studied ceramics at Edinburgh College of Art many years ago. More recently he has returned to drawing and painting as well as green woodworking. A selection of his pieces are exhibited at the Hirsel Gallery in Coldstream on the England/ Scotland border.