Suddenly, her dorm room feels too small

The First Spark

• One girl and one boy:
• just talking, then falling.

• Suddenly, her dorm room feels
• too small, two souls peeled
• clean and raw, like copper wires
• stripped, electricity whipping

• silent sparks, dancing and daring,
• as faces flush and legs brush,
• spellbinding and scaring,

• Until the skin becomes trained
• to crave those shocks like the flame
• that keeps a hearth cozy and warm
• even during the coldest of storms.

Crash and Burn

• I stare down at blistered
• skin now branded by the oven
• days after he cremated my heart.
• Both accidents, I suppose,

• from heat, hypnotic as fireflies:
• the smell of baked cinnamon hugging
• my nostrils or sparks from a
• stray thumb tracing my thigh.

• At age eight, I dreamed of soaring into space
• but I didn’t spy stars in his eyes —
• I found the sun, so bright it stings, scorching
• my wings. Until I
• fall.

• Like the tray of cookies,
• when hot steel kisses flesh.
• The tray doesn’t shatter at impact.
• I do.

WHO AM I?

• If my soles rooted into the ground,
• I’d reign over ’Carolina hills
• without a sound 
• ’til the night it/I screamed,
• struck — by lightning now bound 
• with bark in a splintered
• scar — but not struck down.

• Under lights of the city,
• I am a telephone pole tailored
• in the skin of that tree/me.
• It/I always buzz, so busy
• recording strangers’ lives
• with ink or electricity
• because stolen words sound
• less wooden 
• than my choppy journal entries. 

• Dancing along both trunks,
• another it/me I’d find: a squirrel
• hoarding dreams like domes of pine.
• Most seeds strangle on dirt and die
• while a few bloom and multiply (much
• like one simple question planted
• this poem of mine).

• Perhaps if nature acts as my mirror,
• even once my soul withers,
• in an it, I can reappear.

Casey Cromwell has published poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction in Point Loma Nazarene University’s literary magazine, winning third place for poetry during her sophomore year. She also writes a successful blog (caseythecollegeceliac.blogspot.com) and has written for Further Food, Beyond Celiac, and San Diego Writers, Ink. She is currently a senior writing major at PLNU.