by Ayesha Asad
spring was the season
I began to regret
my idleness,
lying on my belly
as I read tattered, cavernous
volumes, sucking them into
my throat
for consumption.
I ate them as easily
as the
chile limon
chips that peppered
my childhood, like a
warm glaze, carefree, my face a smooth canvas
for puberty to
mar with paint. I used to come home
to pygmy dandelions and jellied lizards. when our parents
closed their
bedroom door, my sister and I huddled
on the sofa together,
wrapping ourselves
like mango peels, protection from the bacteria that
swarmed the carpet, clustered like ant piles.
now, spring is
a flurry of coats falling off chairs
and bootlaces being tightened
and my parents’ white door
blankly opened. there is no time
to explore the bookshelf, to kiss soft
daisies, to oil bike gears laced with grime.
all that idleness,
I don’t think I miss it.
I think I miss
the snowman my sibling and I
built when I was nine,
scraped snow from cold,
slithering grass, darkened with freezing rainwater,
about two feet tall. He couldn’t have
supported much weight,
as it was the first snowfall
we’d gotten in years, and we had to be satisfied
with the scrawny baby carrot
we lodged into the snow, jutting out like
the cragged red boulders
of a canyon. I miss the smooth, pink berries
we plucked from minty leaves
and never ate because
they might’ve been poisonous.
but the idleness, I remember,
floated me to the clouds, where I bathed in papery mist and
rosebud sunrays, and I forgot how to walk
in solid dirt.
Ayesha Asad is a freshman at the University of Texas at Dallas majoring in Literature and Biology. Currently, her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Santa Clara Review, Blue Marble Review, Eunoia Review, Skipping Stones Magazine, and TeenInk and has been recognized by the Creative Writing Ink December 2019 contest.
Emerge Literary Journal 