Exhalations

by Zadie McGrath

in the years between the weeks

a thicket was waiting, a tree was waiting, its wood was waiting, the phloem was waiting, a bead

of bodily sap was waiting, the color of a cat’s eye.

i left my fingerprints etched on the backyard fence

slanting downward to a mossy degrade

below bird’s blood: and the oil of my fingers above.

a splinter left itself in my skin.

remember the time chopped firewood scraped your hand and you thought the cut would scar?

your skin is unblemished,

florid and traceable like your friends press their fingers

onto the back of your hand and leave two eyes and a smile.

so the redwood bark was supposed to leave prints on my

baby-pink fingers, but they only purpled in the chill.

the furred splinters, though, look like my fingers’

fine hairs.

And in the weeks between the years

a thicket’s xylem shivers in a single redwood’s needles.

Weeks, their nights humid, air sweating on me and me

also sweating: I am the air’s visitor, and also its lungs:

my bare arms slide into its weight; my mind strikes and dissolves,

quickly, so I distinguish and the air doesn’t, because it is consuming,

then the redwood consumes the air, and it’s ignorant, but the air is not, to its consumption.

I breathe in someone’s exhalations, or i breathe around them:

incongruity resurfaces in splinters

fingerprinting past weeks and years.

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Zadie McGrath is a high school freshman in San Francisco. A few of her favorite things are fantasy novels, martial arts, and the rain, and her writing has been published in Nightjar Magazine.