a paste: "Something and Not"

 "Something and Not"
  - By Ellie Tipton

We kept walking that day, further than the last.
Somehow the pond was here.

The dense monochromatic heatwave
hovering on the path

so that it bent the air with weight
or atomic gnats.

We left our lovers.
We left ourselves.

How we looked as children –
how we looked as children filling in the silence.

We felt such great emphasis
when the cat-tails furred and shed seed.

When the rains came for days and days –
a skein of sewer run-off iridesced on the surface.

We wanted all this. And the tree-root
became the place where we asked for more.

This had everything to do with us becoming perfect.
And much later, the world —