Amanda Kay
post-dollhood wilderness
the underbrush has caught flame again,
like all the summers when I braided your hair
into rope. days when I’d let you stay over, as
long as the shutters were pulled down. outside,
the hawk screeches, pauses, then plunges to
silence. we watch a man pierce himself on
the treetops as we laid half-buried beneath
wind-strew tulips. back when we were fragile
enough to topple over with the gust, the sequoia
begged us to run and never look back. this was
how it all began: underwater, you'd time how
long you could hold your breath. how you
wouldn’t come up: not until your vision went
dark at the edges and sometimes not even then.
tell me, if we truly loved each other, what we
would’ve said. if we weren’t just looking to give
our bodies to the lust of backcountry, to the brutality
of it all. there’s no one to set curfew, no one to call
our names but each other. ribs, bruised from laughing,
like a child, like all the bones we buried. in the clearing,
I take a knife to the soft pelt of a doe, but all that comes out
is polyester, your face—the kind of remembering
that ends with the shattering of knees and sour bile,
spilling yourself onto the ground slick with mud.
watch as the flood cleanses our bodies, an empty
field, curling into itself. like a mirage from childhood,
it was fitting: you would always be imaginary. how
the creek was still full and I told you to sink, like everything
you once dreamed of. the doll / house on fire, ash ebony
like button eyes, or last sunday’s turkey dinner.
like all the summers when I braided your hair
into rope. days when I’d let you stay over, as
long as the shutters were pulled down. outside,
the hawk screeches, pauses, then plunges to
silence. we watch a man pierce himself on
the treetops as we laid half-buried beneath
wind-strew tulips. back when we were fragile
enough to topple over with the gust, the sequoia
begged us to run and never look back. this was
how it all began: underwater, you'd time how
long you could hold your breath. how you
wouldn’t come up: not until your vision went
dark at the edges and sometimes not even then.
tell me, if we truly loved each other, what we
would’ve said. if we weren’t just looking to give
our bodies to the lust of backcountry, to the brutality
of it all. there’s no one to set curfew, no one to call
our names but each other. ribs, bruised from laughing,
like a child, like all the bones we buried. in the clearing,
I take a knife to the soft pelt of a doe, but all that comes out
is polyester, your face—the kind of remembering
that ends with the shattering of knees and sour bile,
spilling yourself onto the ground slick with mud.
watch as the flood cleanses our bodies, an empty
field, curling into itself. like a mirage from childhood,
it was fitting: you would always be imaginary. how
the creek was still full and I told you to sink, like everything
you once dreamed of. the doll / house on fire, ash ebony
like button eyes, or last sunday’s turkey dinner.
Biography
Amanda Kay (she/her) is a sixteen-year-old, Asian-American writer from the Bay Area. In her free time, she enjoys drinking caffeinated beverages hot enough to burn her throat and walking sandy beaches. You can find her at @akay_amanda on Twitter.
