I Still Live
Born enamored
with the sea
and light
and all that
it reflects off of,
the surfaces
that were familiar
until the sunset, until
the broken glass
settled against our tongues
and the roofs of our mouths
prayer room silent.
There were ululations
over the desert
that settled into
the wombs of cactus blossoms,
the small oases in the vast unforgiven.
Her name was something
like a stream that I
can’t remember and she
yelled back at our echoes:
“Do not fill us yet, we are still alive.”
We waited for the acerb air
to mummify us
somewhat and I remember
hearing about caves, the crystal
dormant in them
and dry, the water seeping
toward the chambers
for 10,000 years.
STEPHANIE L. ERDMAN lives in Southwest Michigan and holds a Master’s in English from Indiana University South Bend. She works as a vacuum cleaner technician and adjust professor of English Composition and Rhetoric. She spends her nights eyeing the Indiana border with suspicion. Her work has also appeared in Eclectica Magazine, Analecta, and The Belltower, and her full-length manuscript; ”Pyrrhonic” has been picked up by Dos Madres Press and will be appearing in print soon.
Twyckenham Notes 