by Molly Kathryn Fisher
we sniffed the sharpie first. sniffed and snuffled and snickered i think i do feel a bit of something you guys because tina m. said the red sharpie’d take us somewhere over the motherfucking rainbow.
dizzy,
daydreamy,
and delirious on indelible markers, slip-sliding down the yellow brick road for
felt-tip phallic funny
fifth grade girl fun.
poppy-painted pinkies pretzeled together on the playground, promising an eternity in cahoots.
you look at me,
a pair of eyes centered like the wormhole of the red slide.
i can see our future.
the summer i turn twenty i start sleeping on hardwood floors instead of beds. arm reaching for alarm clocks, reaching for little girl feet dangling off a picnic bench. pomegranate guts in a grocery bag between us. red on our ledgers soaked together and we feast.
did we wash each other off – overflowing the laundry with our mothers’ detergent, remembering not to mix reds with whites and mud-stained endless summers with the beige drip of adulthood. a blood-oath-stained carpet thrown to the street, dirty and asking for takers. ruby glitter glue scars will scab over. there’s no place like home. we won’t remember.
please, let’s play on the swings instead.
© Molly Kathryn Fisher
Molly Kathryn Fisher is a writer based in the Chicagoland area, earning a BA in Literature from North Central College. Winner of the 2022 and 2023 Ruth Cooley Poetry Prize, her poems “my stream of consciousness fails the bechdel test” and “Disco Ball Blues” are featured on poets.org. Her work also appears in Moonflake Press, The Erozine, and the fridge at her parents’ house. Molly is fond of Carole King, the color green, and feeling too much.
Find out more on mollykathrynfisher.com.
Share the love and wonder by making sure to respect the copyrights! Everything we publish belongs to the authors. You can share their texts via the official link. If you quote them, please credit them. If you wish to republish their work, you can always write to us and we will put you in direct contact with them. Supporting creativity starts with respecting those who create, so we thank you in advance for doing your part!
The Amazine Community 