Collateral Damage of the Heart
after Snow
Victoria Kerrigan
Kenyon College
Romance
Content Warnings: None
The great bay-window spawned books against it.
Spines chilled, glacial.
My back to you,
favoring the tangerine-tinted greenhouse with my gaze instead.
You offered more alcohol,
Samuel Adams peeking out of the closet,
reasonably, I declined.
You reclined, beckoning.
That poster on your conveniently absent
roommate's side of the wall,
team bear and whale
swirling into intrepid water,
tumbling into violet unknowns
a kind of dreamscape I long to enter.
I prefer the mythical to the physical.
I kid not. Kid, I am.
Clammy hand clasping my kneecap,
you coaxed
me, skittish, wide-eyed animal.
I was hedging, shy.
Cooling my forehead against the white wall, crimped by your need,
—your childhood,
your ex,
your sick mother,
your dead dog—
tailoring me to your need.
I mused.
Whose muse?
At least one of us was amused.
The absurdity of happenstance, the world as incorrigibly plural.
My interest tipping
journalistic. Intrigue evaporating, but never
canned.
3 a.m., the plane-catching hour,
I unclasped myself
rolled dice-like back into
the violence of a violet night.
Victoria Kerrigan is a writer from Brooklyn, NY. She has been awarded a Scholastic Gold Key in Poetry and has work forthcoming in No Tokens. She attends Kenyon College where she works for The Kenyon Review and is an editor for Sunset Press. Other than writing, she plays ultimate frisbee and likes the way her cowboy boots sound on the hardwood floor.