War Times

• Monique Scalzo, Grade 11
• Poetry
• 2017

I can see misery everywhere.
It pulls at my limbs. It tugs at my hair.
Exhaustion is making a permanent home in my bones, making them heavy, weighing them down,
Crumbling amongst this hopeless, hungry side of town.
But at the same time, I am hollow, empty like the spaces between the stars,
A delicate and potent nostalgia of burning cigars.
I desperately don’t want to forget those slow snowy days,
Or how the liquid amber bathed the alleyways,?
Slippery hands of paint and the sound of Papa’s feet,
And the scrawny boy I laughed with down the street.
Yet it seems that memories are fleeting, fragile things,
Like butterflies and their beautiful crimson wings.
So I inhale and hold the evening in my lungs.
Remembering the fizzy, sickly sweet taste of champagne on my tongue.
Sadly I am only drowning in recollection, as ink drips from my pen.
So when all things cease to exist, they will remain inside my ink stains, alive once again.