April 11, 2022

notes on the fallout
- tori ashley matos

the night i asked if you’d shield me from the blast
was the night i decided that i’d never be able
to leave you.    

this way whatever happens next, it
would be my fault for giving too much of myself—
whatever was left after the bleeding would be yours
to keep, even if you stayed walking away from me
and never turned to ask if i was following.
the museum at 15 was when i decided if i could not
grow up to be a forest i would grow up to kiss
every woman on earth with hair as short as my father’s.
when i turned 12 i learned i could make myself into a
river.      at 6 i learned that no water could ever quench
the thirst of the fire i saw and shouldn’t have seen.      but
i think now, in the desperation of my missing you, that i
would let you rain paper from the sky which has always been
a most potent omen of death, if it meant i could
gift you with the agony of sewing my skin back together as
it melted from me.     even memory has its place in the
present danger.    the forest i wanted to become is some
where lush i go when faced with an ending.     i was sat
on the train before the end of the world     before i knew
the world could end and i      would go on living
and in the tunnel a million miles underground
i was still turning pages in my novel in the forest
i planted from the ash of the new world.

this night you were there.
so i’ve decided you will always be there even
when you leave me.