Shit I Keep Telling Myself I'll Use, But Probably Won't Realistically (That I'll Keep Anyway for Fear of Wasted Potential)
Amy Jarvis
in this box of my brother’s discarded dreams, we are
silhouettes. somewhere along the line we dissolved into
amalgams became & bartered
ourselves into one another. the hero complex did not
originate in Heracles, its roots exist in every older sibling who
use peripheral vision as instinct for protection. here’s the kicker—
we store fragments of ourselves away for later, then they
calcify & we blame the road not taken. what this means:
family trees are gnarled & knotted, a collective memory
firing off in every cartographed direction. when we talk
about external factors we’re ignoring common
snares. genetics don’t explain the fear of forgotten potential, but
when I say hagiography, every saint
haloed & immaculate, I remember my hands
first allowed to cradle your scalp. you were a reddened
nebula, small & infinite in my once-nicked palm. & what
about the sycamore, the seeds in your mouth, the baby teeth
you’ve spat out into my hands. it’s like each of us is
a half-formed reflection of one another what looks out
does not look back.
Amy Jarvis is a junior Creative Writing major who originally hails from Rhode Island. In her free time, she's either fighting back against how her body's failed her, or inventing new worlds to beat it from. She’s a poet, a lover of light, and a hopeless romantic, although not necessarily in that order.
Issue 14
2020