Ellie Wright’s Summer: A Collection

A summertime moon that served as a muse. / Photographer: Ellie Wright

Bursting

The ocean is three feet from my door

My soles nudge at the outside ground

The sun has descended, left the sky with a gaping hole

And I find that all my words are becoming hyperboles

 

The first gulp of summer air

Pushes and inflates my chest

All the lines are blurred, and all the rules are broken

All my words are at once spoken

 


 

Freedom – Light – Joy

 

Tumbling through late spring air, landing in the pool

Sitting on my windowsill, breaking hollow rules

Backpacks lined with linen sheets, warm midnight rains

The day that I really found the meaning of my name

 

I’ve swallowed the sun

Light is filling up my belly

My insides are burning

The color of pennies

 

The moon is a woman and I really like the cold

I pushed my feet into the ocean and let my arms unfold

Speeding on our bikes, tree branches brush across my face

After hours, in the backyard, sing the chorus, play the bass

 

I’ve swallowed the sun

Light is filling up my belly

The world tugs on my hand

And I think that’s pretty funny

 

I feel every inch of earth, can’t remember feeling numb

Sidewalk cracks filled with creeping vines, dandelions, and gum

Screaming on the roof with you, summer is coming

Everything is beautiful when everything is something

 


 

These poems come from a memory of summer. Fragments I scrawled on fast food napkins and in the margins of notebooks. Now, as summer has waned into fall, and fall surely trudges on, I bring together the pieces to create a recollection of the freedom and the joy of that time. It bears an ever so slightly disjointed form, but memories often do. I hope this prose can bring you the feeling of sun in your gut and water washing over your feet. Keep summer in your minds, even in these ever darkening, ever shortening days.

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