By A.L. Lily

tell me about that night, seventeen and hungry. time melting on our tongues.
can you remember
how the sun was already half-dissolved in the sky, so we let it run through our fingers
watched as it wrapped your wrist, shivered over your pulse. watched as it painted us golden
how the sand was not sand but ground-up bones, all that was left of the girls we’d been
no one ever leaves, you said, and i replied
yes, they do
how i fed on the shore until my mouth ached, but still couldn’t find her. still the same girl with the sun-stained fingertips, but stomach swollen.
a sort of auto cannibalism, a desperate consumption of the past.
later, you drove fast enough on the freeway that the stars slipped underneath the layers of sky, left everything around us black and quaking
and all i could think of was carnival bumper cars, bleached pink plastic. ribbons of blonde hair on the bathroom floor.
there’s the flowers no longer in bloom, can you still feel them in your palms? see your life line? that’s how you know we survive.
this is it, you said, hands off the steering wheel, this is what it is to grow up

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A.L. Lily is a 17 year old aspiring writer from Regional New South Wales. She loves performing, creating stories, and feminist punk rock.