He made her the sun. But now he chases the moon, looking for the same light from a duller star.
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.
Go. Run. Leave. For you were not born to stay still.
I’ve been smiling at temporary faces looking into temporary eyes kissing temporary lips touching temporary bodies searching for you.
We ache for the zing of a strawberry when we can no longer taste the seeds— like remembering you, bitter and beautiful on my tongue.
Sometimes I wonder if beginnings have endings or if endings are only beginnings of something else.
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.
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.
I kissed and kissed until I could almost forget how restless I’d become.