Poetry:
Carina Solis
shattered
it’s like we’re flickering, burst lamplights
smirking in the dark. faces gaunt, we lounge
on a half-shaded stairway, the moon and its smile
hanging over our emptiness, crooked as burnt cigarettes.
we pant smoke into the horizon and watch haze
cut into our skin: all we taste is desperation.
in the play of our lives, the night is a blackened man
with lips like a butter knife, ready to gouge our sharp bones
and every paltry breath. we only kiss him to hate ourselves more.
if we are going to be empty, let’s be empty together,
carved and bent like magnolia buds in between sidewalk cracks
—we’ll go ahead and break, the flowers in us withering as if we are
only living to die. and, voices hushed in the dark,
we can’t hear our hearts whispering let me go.
Carina Solis is a sixteen-year-old writer living in Georgia. She has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, The National Poetry Quarterly, The New York Times, and others, and her work appears in Gone Lawn, Wrongdoing Magazine, HAD, and elsewhere. Currently, she serves as a Senior Editor at Polyphony Lit, and a General Editor at the Origami Review. Find more of her work on her website carinasolis.carrd.co or on her Twitter @carinasol_.
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