they call it walking forward by ritapa neogi

watching my toes
flip-flop on the subtle mud marinating in the poached egg
of a sun sizzling in silence as it watches me spill mascara all over my new white
flamingo crop-top from a store that uses bangladeshi
sweatshops
 
watching my crimson-red nails
swallow all the golden memory the sky’s embraced
over nineteen years of tears and puddles of blood leaking from my nose because
i can’t drink enough water because when i collect every crystal-clear drop to drown in
sorrow and not even a sip goes into my dehydrating
body
 
watching each bespeckled pebble
soak the heat like it was born in a flurry of confusion
and sweat and grew up knowing its path around the milky way,
cycling around the globe
on an eternal journey for the perfect shoe to cross its
path
 
watching the eyelashes i blow
into the air thinking that wishes are
thoughts you can shed
like stray hairs and antidepressants strewn into toilets,
flushed into a dying blue-and-green planet i’ll never have to
face
 
watching this destruction as i walk forward,
and forward
melting into the summer glare my parents tell me is only temporary,
and soon i can go back to
wallowing in gray, rainy portland days that sink beneath the moon and surf under the
starlight
 
watching my body
lay in bed like the socks in my empty, empty college dorm room that are
unclean and unloved
like the red high-tops in the corner of every teenage girl’s closet and
the simple sound of ripping a sheet of paper from a sketchbook
you’ve kept for ten long years, technically a decade but using synonyms
 
doesn’t feel right when you’ve already got the words on the tip
of your tongue while you’re watching the planet spin ‘round and
‘round on its permanent axis in a very non-permanent life
as your red high-tops are shifting so quickly forward and your eyes are a little glazed as
you remind yourself this is only
temporary

✱✱✱

Ritapa Neogi is a short and cynical jellyfish enthusiast from Portland, OR. Her poetry has been previously featured in many publications, including Cosmonauts Avenue, Wildness Journal, and Five To One Magazine. In her free time, Ritapa enjoys making comics and reading about thermohaline circulation.