5/1/11

The Corner of Cherry Street
By Shannon


There’s a place on the corner of Cherry Street where all I see is your face. The way you were begging me not to stay, while your eyes were saying don’t go away. And our feet were tangoing, their reflections in the glass, doing the back and forth shuffle of uncertain endings.

Your eyes are in the mirror squares of the door fronts, lips in all the roses, and when I look you’re screaming my name. Goodbye words drop from your lips, and poison my coffee here at this café. At this café where we seduced death to separate our paths, here where I felt your feathery fingers brush my knuckles as I went, but then only fern leaves next to prison bar fences. There was no whisper on the breeze, unlike now where our song lilts through the trees, swirling steam in lazy dance steps, and meeting the lips of street performers.

I am silent and alone in delusions, forgetting how your palms smacked against my chest like a drunken kiss when you pushed me away. Forgetting the way your eyes spat words foreign to us before, and clouded with shadows the same shade as those cast by the table umbrellas in the fading sunset.

My feet are rooted to the ground like they were by your kiss, my eyes are closing and opening, blinking ordinarily, and yet I do not fall. I am solid unlike our past, sturdy like your legs in that skirt, creating pale creamy rectangles between the fence bars. But sturdy is an unromantic word which you chastised me for with blushing cherry blossom cheeks.

Now the world is fading gray, darker and silent as the leaves from your tea. You hated coffee. You hated me, at least in that moment where you warred with yourself. I saw the battle on the ocean of your face, emotions churning like waves in a tempest, tides changing to whisk me away.

And I miss you; I carve it in the wood of our favorite table. I scrape my nails against the soft wood, clawing at a piece of our memories, but there’s nothing left but splinters. Splinters in my fingers, splinters in my heart. They ache; I ache with the sight of you in every place I go, here on Cherry Street. Here at the corner of Cherry Street where all I see is your face.


- - -
I still live on an island in the Chesapeake, but this one's not nearly so picturesque.