Ghost of My Glow-in-the-Dark Friend               

The day you died,

I was riding in the car, clutching

fragments of my girlhood.

Mama told me how

the freshwater swallowed the pink out of your skin,

dulled your ocean eyes

& bloated lips, decayed

before they could ripen. Last night, I

watched your body glow

with untampered youth, golden

skin rippling like harvested wheat. Now,

your bones are dirt cakes & mud whistles.

Your throat hollowed out. Your breath

fuming from chimneys, American Dream

of oxygen. Your scales against

acid backwater. Skeletal,

chlorinated water swished & sucked

out of your grave. Your pockmarked

skin sullied with soot. Your ribs like teeth, suffocated

under pillows & buried in childhood. You never got a chance

to lose yours.

—

The grass is tethered

by its roots, daisies twisting

under stems. Rain swells

into murky streams,

pulsing & alive. I watch

the wheat ripening above you.

I watch the seeds

sprout from your golden body. I watch

the underbellies of sneakers

plastered with muck,

brown-walled fortress. David’s army.

I don’t mind if they step

over your grave.

I think you would like it. I think

if you saw how the ocean swelled,

a spice hollowed, chalk-dry against

cragged rocks – I think you would smile.

I think you would hear it

thundering your name.

__________

Ayesha Asad is from Dallas, Texas. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Reunion: The Dallas Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Menacing Hedge, Neologism Poetry Journal, Pulp Poets Press, and elsewhere. Her writing has been recognized by Creative Writing Ink Journal and the Robert Bone Memorial Poetry Prize. She studies Literature and Biology at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she writes for The Mercury. In her free time, she likes to dream.