Igneous:
The way I began to love you was igneous, something molten bubbling over the cracks, into the air of me. I held it in my palms and watched the liquid go, stored the heat along my lifeline so that it hardened. This is how to hold a burning thing – the evidence of a river that would destroy the Earth to erupt, the proof that below me something was moving, magma raging, twirling orange in my heart.
Sedimentary:
Then it was the things I collected day to day, without realizing, a sort of savoring. I didn’t realize how memories congealed to become pasts – plants which had once flowered melding with the dirt that housed them, leftovers you cooked last night new in our mouths the next morning. They come together like moons, collect in our hands, easy. The sky above us is fresh in spring, a breath which carries on.
Metamorphic:
And this is how it ends, which is how it begins: the heat of that magma twisting the clusters of our memories into a molecularly different thing, a possibility, in this world but also the next, marbled palms of water upon water, echoes of movement in the ocean of our lifetimes, the universe itself changing, just slightly, like the wind between a butterfly’s wings, which is really just your hand tucking hair behind my ear.
Devaki Devay is a South Asian writer of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Their debut chapbook, LOOKING IN LIGHT, is now out with Bottlecap Press. Find their other work in Okay Donkey, Peatsmoke, and Barren Magazine, and follow them @DevakiDevay.