"Traveller" By Megan Gerret
This courtyard is haunted, alive and closed
bereft, though compressed, suffocated like me alone and striding, striving for surviving yet all I see are others that pass silently. Pixilated machine, a hybrid world, I find myself stuck in the corner of, a parallel reality. Awakened, warily look left and right, decide when to fight and when to be demure, invisible. My pink wall—mirror image, separated drift, I embrace myself to keep the cold out and hold it in. A calling-card, a desk with nothing in it but one grayscale photograph of ever-changing steps. I try not to reach out and call to someone jade-beaded, false pupiled—I long to be looked at, yet I look at no one and no one looks at one another and no one looks inward, at herself. She feels refracted, while others suddenly sense her phantom presence outlined against an arc-- black, webbed and netted; time is not a numbered clock. Travel is a game I play, like single-player hopscotch. Next thing I note, this flowery band, it praises my figure, my steady posture, and uncertain gaze. These posters, that bench, those cars, will begin to talk aloud, friendly voices saying, ‘How are you, my sweet?’ Their sly doubts will begin to creep behind my ear like spiders in a field of yellow spinning straw, keeping to themselves; I hear more: ‘Why did you leave your others? butterflies in their teary eyes, sunlight in their laughter.’ My lip quivers, my hair falls flat down across my face and finally, I resign: ‘Hush,’ the leprechaun tells me. ‘They won’t find us here,’ he grins and dances about. Why not? I wonder. He answers me slowly, ‘No one knows we existed. You won’t be missed out there.’ |
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Megan Gerrett is a poet and creative fiction writer. She is majoring in Creative Writing & Literature at Western and enjoys getting involved in and attending poetry events, such as Boomerang. In her writing, she likes to explore themes of nature, the divine, the fantastical, and the strange.
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