Seventeen Years

In my dream you were alive.

I saw you:
a broken man with a crooked smile
telling me
it’s been seventeen years.
You’ve been looking for me
for seventeen years.
You’ve been in love with me
for seventeen years.

It’s been seventeen years since
your spine cracked upon impact.
It was just one of those things
that happened, an accident.
No one’s fault.
No one
to shoulder the blame.

In my dream, I look for the book
you gave me, the only thing
you ever gave me, hungry for a signature
scrawled on the first page.
Your j’s look
like g’s in fast black ink.

It has been seventeen years
since we raced the halls together.
A good kid who smiled too much.
A chip of broken tile and notes passed by girls.

You never should have become a name
smeared to the highway.
Never should have been anything more than
a fond memory,
a high school crush,
a missed connection.

Now,
you survive in the pit of my stomach,
and despite a promise of pleasant reminiscence,
the dream shifts to the crack of a skeleton,
the shattering of front teeth.
I can’t trade this image
for a kinder one.
It haunts me.
It haunts me still.

More than anything in the world,
I want to find you,
to call you,
to write you a message in my
sloppy script assuring you
some things never die.
But
you are already lost to me.

This is how I wake,
chasing rabbits and following sparrows.
At a loss for what I cannot quite reach.
You were always the elusive one.

So, I lay here, and endure.

It is as sweet as
the Sunday morning
we never shared.

Need more good reads? Get your fix:

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• Senior – Poetry
• There Isn’t Language for This – Short Essay
• Just Taking Out the Trash – Poetry
• Skywalker 4 – Poetry
• Emma’s Place Part 1 & Part 2 & Part 3 – Fiction
• Mondays – Micro-essay
• Traveling Back in Time with Outlander – Literary Travel
• Closing Chapter on Friendship – Things I Wish I Had Said
• Ripe with Anxiousness – Nostalgia Flash Fiction

Katrina Kaye

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Katrina Kaye is a writer and educator living in Albuquerque, NM. She hoards her published writings on her website ironandsulfur.com and is seeking an audience for her ever-growing surplus of poetic meanderings. She is grateful to anyone who reads her work and in awe of those willing to share it.

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