Sun orange
(August 2016)
Was it for this we whispered to no one?
Later, hanging off the back of a Jeep, with just my hands,
how do I stay? I asked.
In California, we sat around a fire and I broke the code. Not even written in my crooked hand could I say. I tried to keep it from my future self. She of course would know. Instead, I wrote how
I walked into freezing Lake Tahoe in a bright green bikini and cried underwater.
How well we believed there was a total, larger, and we knew how to grasp it.
Mix me in.
I called today and you were away,
so I leave this at your ear
and crawl out of the subway to the sun,
exhausted, Debussy light.
That beat has to be willed.
Lauren Hilger is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016.) Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from the MacDowell Colony, she has also received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared or forthcoming in BOMB, Harvard Review online, Kenyon Review online, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.
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