poetry

-- Julia --

I think you laughed your way into this world and since then hardly anything can take that vivacious grin from your face. You have enough sunshine to fill all your pockets  when they aren't filled with vodka and wherever you go you kick up stardust in your wake.

You’re all flashing green eyes and long legs and big, vibrant red hair because you haven’t half-assed anything all your life, always bigger, better, brighter.

Wherever I am you’re there too but always three times more, shining radiantly and drawing eyes from all directions because your lemons were already lemonade when you were born and I sit behind you struggling with the juicer.

You love to talk about things like artistic flair and what it really means to be alive and other times you pull me down next to you and ask me to watch the stars with you while you tell me what they’re thinking about because you were one of them once

You think risks are meant to be taken, standing at the edge of the cliff with the winds in your hair was where you are meant to be and you know it

You told me that the ocean held secrets you were dying to know and that if we stood in the surf with our fingers interlocked for long enough we might begin to hear them whispering from the waves

When I look at you it takes me a minute or few to piece you together because of all the bangles and scarves and patterns that drape about you, singing with color and your makeup caked on thick even though you never needed it.

You’ve danced across treetops, oceans, and universes. Gathering scraps of light and pinning them in your hair so that next time I see you I’m blinded for a moment

If I’m a spark, then you’re a sun or more likely a comet,  shooting and spinning within constellations with reckless abandon, hurting, and amazing. Sometimes both because you were always too impatient and liked everything better if it zoomed towards you and then left as quickly as it came because any sign of permanence makes you uncomfortable and that’s why you never wrote anything down but instead sung it into the breeze because once you told me you were a child of the wind and I believed you.

Your eyes had fires and hurricanes and supernovas inside them and sometimes the beauty of those disasters drew me in and I forgot the chaos they meant, the chaos of disaster you held within you.

The disaster you never sung to the breeze but you never wrote it down either.

Maybe I’m the only one that saw it.

Because you called yourself a child of the wind and I believed you because I saw the wind cause miracles and I saw the wind cause pain

And I saw you.

--Olivia--

I can see the words you never wrote

They’re etched into your skin and sometimes I read them

Tilting my head to see the letters swirling in patterns across your arms, legs, face

Sometimes I catch them in the movement of your hands while you speak

Or I see your toes tracing them into the sand

Broken thoughts on fingertips,

Fractured ideas in your eyes,

Moonbeams shooting from your slender frame.

And for a moment I stop trying to predict the future

and think of all the times I’ve awoken to see you

when the stars are at their brightest

with mildewy wondering in your eyes

and you ask me questions

and I give you my midnight answers because I’m more awake than you know

and your hands are like the secrets I’ve been yearning to hear

and I’m amazed at the way you coexist with yourself

something I’ve never been able to do.

--Mia--

When I wear your sweater I tell you its to keep me warm

And its really because I want a little bit of you to rub off the wooly threads and onto me

because every time I look at you

A peice of me breaks off

And I lose myself in the hint of oceans your eyes hold

the constellations  that your every angle creates

I wear your sweater so I’ll never forget the midnight whispering

and the way you always smelled of vanilla

In its pockets I can find the sunny June mornings

when I’d discover the cups of tea you’d left around the house

the evening before

one forgotten on the windowsill

one in the kitchen sink

one out in the garden laying next to a collection of Walt Whitman

And one I left on your bedside table

Hoping you’d find it when you woke

--Sophia--

You were the girl with thunderclouds inside of you

My tempest was internal while yours raged about you,

I tucked mine away, invisible girl

You set yours loose on the world, stormy girl

Tell me where did you get all that thunder?

I tuck my hands in my pockets while yours fly about your face

Acting out stories that flew from the whirlwind of your concious

Stories I’ll never understand

because my inner storm is breaking me down

violently whipping through the  atmosphere of my mind

While yours only makes you stronger.

--Amelia--

You’re all curves and flowing hair

nurturing hands cradling dreams and a lap built for eager childrens bony knees and elbows

You tell soft stories with your movements

simple and lovely you bring unprecedented affection to all around you

And the scent of spices drifts from your being

And butterflies flutter onto the flowers you have carelessly braided throughout your hair

put there by six tiny caring hands

belonging to three shining daughters

You greet them with sparkling eyes and opened arms

Hugging them to your breast as tight as the sky holds the earth

Hoping to slow the growth of their wings

So she has a little more time to teach them not to fly too fast