Raft Craft

I see you’re in the sea and cold, you in your legs,
spread-eagled morningpants tight to the calfbuckle.
Are you hiding in the particular grommets
of this seabelt? Come on out,

I see you, and the holy
the sick and the haunted (who scream,
we have no mouths). Are
these your bald desires, your manyfriends?

Do you want to cross this pink
pistiled spring of September? This
wetdeath, do you want to bloat
across it like a hollowed fish of a man?

Come, tittle, and bring the wooden glue.
Bring the gate and tickle of paperdry,
the box that once held the box that held your blankie,
that childblue thing. Now

this fashion we cradle, this raft we craft,
will be your unanchor. Will carry.
Bring the matches and a needlethrum.
Now pick up your heel and help! Here

go the neatsails. Here the bench for the
waterbirds to perch and lull on. Here,
that sly horncircle of a wheel. Turn it slow
then slowfast. No waves to wade or wade

through. Befumble right on in. Just listen to
the subtle putter of the clearsky’s retort.
The hair in your wind. To shore, to shore.

Red House

That’s all there was to that. I slept alone

in a large bed, and a large dog slept beside it. The
hair on the dog was black and curly in small

chimneys, and the dog’s body was always warm.

It was deep winter, the deepest part of it. Like a moat too deep
to swim in, but still we were swimming in it, my dog and I,
through the inky snow depths of it. I woke alone

in the late afternoons to greet the goldest parts

of the light, which fell through the slatted shades on my
window in neat lines. I liked to watch the sun going

down. I took my old dog out to watch it. He was old
enough to like to watch it. The ground was thin with ice.
The trees had become bare while I slept. Together,

a leash holding us together,

we would walk to the edge of everything. The road there
had no turns. It hurt to see it so in front of us,
the way the ends fray until they’re thinner than

thin, until they’re not ends anymore. After this life
in our red house there would be no ends anymore,

but for now there were ends — that’s why the perennial
winter. That’s why the beautiful. When the cold was enough
in us we returned home to our red house, which had one
room. The room had one large bed. The bed was soft
and deep. I poured myself tea and drank it in the bed.
I poured my grief into my dog’s metal bowl, and my dog
drank it. I poured my grief into my dog.

That’s all there was to that.

Liliana tends to live and write in Providence, RI. She studies creative writing at Brown University, where she received the Feldman Prize in Fiction and the Rose Low Rome Prize for Poetry. For now, she is 20. Read more of her work in The College Hill Independent and (forthcoming-ly) HAD Magazine.