DIARY, IZVOR (SPRING)

The air conditioning vent can’t bear to look at me, lazily tosses its tumultuous breeze up to the glum upholstery, until I triumphantly jam a sun-bleached gas station receipt and packet promising the exile of garment stains into its cradle and funnel the cooled air towards my bare collarbone. Ah. Winter’s gooseflesh, for the sweat of summer’s torch, I sit patio-side, svelte ankle propped upon one knee, observing the suicide of soft petal blooms from a flowering bush, a rustling of detachment, a slow swan dive battered by branches. Belated intervention. 
 

Nights in delirious elation. Seas I am swimming. I am growing, growing. My mind, my soul. Grown-ups are a myth, you know. Who are we to declare that we cannot grow anymore? Grow your hope, your compassion, your courage. Grow your knowledge, your tolerance, your spirituality, your love. Plant these things within the garden beds of your being, treat them with tender patience, resilience. Deeper, deeper, dig. Crucified with flaws, we are resurrected.


Photos by Amber Ortolano

DIARY, HARU (SPRING)

I break my fingers on the bones of words, bejeweled in the silk dressings of spring air, fragrant and purged of winter. The voluptuous moon has fallen prey to dieting schemes and lost half its weight, in the night enmeshed with the little crowns of stars and soft contours. In the delicate slope of wood where we’ve stood between our doors, my mouth, the desert rose, can’t hum, but these iced and numbed fingers strike the piano chords of a typewriter, the musical instrument of the wordsmith.

Photo by Sally Mann, Candy Cigarette, 1989