About the Poet
Zoe Cunniffe is a poet and singer-songwriter from Washington, DC. She has previously been published in literary journals such as Velvet Fields, Trouvaille Review, Meniscus and The Showbear Family Circus, and she can be found on Instagram at @there.are.stillbeautifulthings.
-By Zoe Cunniffe
The Dream
most days it is as thought I never knew you.
i screamed and thrashed and woke from the dream
unscathed. opened my eyes in brand new light.
i wish you would have left a mark, somewhere secret:
the underside of my knee, the precipice of my scalp,
the jagged slot between my front teeth.
if I don’t remember you, did it happen at all?
like fingers out a car window, air that slips through.
my friends ask why I photograph the buildings,
capture every inch of brick and mortar, but I can’t
breathe without permanence. I go over it again and again:
the party in April, sixteen years old, irregular breathing.
your arms around me for the first time,
the last time. they left no indentation.
now i see you in blurry crowds. your fingers crawl
across my back when rain drips down my window.
i breathe you in on the overpass, peering down
at the lights below. you exist everywhere but in the flesh,
and maybe that is all you ever were: fleeting,
fictitious.
Shelter & Storm
Originally published in Under the Wires Magazine
I remember how we drove with the headlights on,
how I touched up my lipstick in the dark mirror:
fingers trembling, a dash of red across my chin.
black dress, soft makeup, bare feet.
rain poured like a nightmare, rushing.
we crept through the dirt, twigs poking our skin.
this was love, I decided: an evening painting yourself,
reshaping yourself, just to end up storm-soaked in the forest.
dead of night, blinding blackness.
I knew you only by your heartbeat.
my muscles ached, feet sore from crawling between trees,
but I’ll never crave the daylight. this was intimacy:
lying on our backs, starless summer sky,
knowing without seeing your face that these were your fingers
clutching mine. I didn’t need you to say you loved me.
I heard it in the rain, in the lightning,
in the way your breathing shifted as we fell asleep,
celestial and freezing.
