I would put my lips to your canvas, taste where the sweat dripped from the paintbrush, and the thick, metallic earthiness of your skin. I would run my tongue over the ridges of your beautifully crafted surface, kiss where the colors meet the edge of the frame. Claim it all as mine.
Catalog
Marisa Donnelly
Marisa Donnelly graduated Summa Cum Laude from Waldorf University in May 2015 with a B.S. in Secondary English Education, a B.A. in English, and a B.A. in Creative Writing with endorsements in Secondary Reading and Coaching. She is a Midwest-born, West Coast-based writer, poet, essayist and licensed teacher working as a full-time Staff Writer and Editor/Producer for Thought & Expression Co.
She has started to smile when her path is spinning to laugh when life grabs at her ankles pulling like dead weight. She has started to trust in the ways of the world to release her hold on what she cannot control heartache, hurt, change. She has started to realize that her body is beautiful, her…
My poor heart is tired. Yet it keeps on beating. And so I will follow its rhythm, let it guide me home.
She is learning to pull faith from the wind, breathe it in and set her worries free.
I can close my eyes and still remember the way the earth smelled like gravel and sunburnt skin, the cheap gas-station vodka burning my throat, a boy’s hand on the small of my back, the black, black sky watching my every move.
Whenever I was dizzy and drunk on freedom and loneliness I would look up to right myself again. And the sky, those roads, these stars would guide my tired heart home.
I tried to kiss away the emptiness screaming ‘I love you’ into the spaces as if I could fill him, us. He was my first experience with transience— searching for a residence in the impermanent.
He kissed me, and I thought of all the names of the constellations, all the patterns I had yet to trace, all the world I had yet to feel underneath my feet.
The roads called at night, always long and lonesome and winding. She always drove with one hand on the wheel, the windows rolled down, the gas pressed just a little too far. This was her way of running when her legs couldn’t carry her fast enough.
He kissed me and I stared up at the sky, drinking in the midnight black. The night seemed endless, I wanted to hold the stars in the palm of my hand. I wanted to drink the moment in and commit it to poetry. I didn’t want to ever forget.
You are time. We move together passionate lovers. Each other’s desire, each other’s demise.
She felt the interstate shift under her feet each step, a promise of who she would one day become.
Run wild with me. Taste the flavors of the earth on your tongue, drink in the sky, the sounds, the smells. I cannot be rooted to four walls, one town.
I don’t want my life to fit in a little box, to bend, to mold, to be a certain shape. I want to lean my head back and take in the sky and all its colors. I want to stick out my tongue and lick the fresh rain. I want to squish my toes into dirt and lay in the green grass and close my eyes. I don’t…
You and I were never meant to last too many elbows, too much skin two bodies intertwined in beds but never dreams.
Tonight I’ll drive until I run out of gas chasing the sun.
The highway slipped past our quiet tires, streetlights specks in the distance. I lost all sense of time, out of place from my suburban town, seeking solace in our silence. As we drove on, I watched the stars their quiet elegance magical, twinkling, unafraid. And on that unfamiliar highway I didn’t…
I was dizzy in love with the idea of love so much so I expected boys who were not men to chase me when what I really wanted was to chase everything that didn’t taste like home.
I should have known your kiss would taste like rebellion. I should have known those lips would hurt and heal.
Maybe our bodies are just hearts with legs and that’s why we’re so quick to run.