...enough...

…I heard her giggle on the line, it was white, airy, and bell-shaped…and I wanted for a cloche, to encapsulate, to capture the sound of a youth we hadn’t resided in decades, to place it on a sunlit sill and breathe life… …it struck my brain at an angle of return, it hounded a burial, but there was no resurrection… …I sealed her in the garden, my fingers running along the rosemary, capturing the oil in the lines of my palm… …we haunted a yard, long ago, beneath tulip poplar invocation and cicada manifestation…we trespassed a gated estate, sugar cubes in our pockets and bird songs upon our tongues…stepped moss-laden stone walls…leapt milkweed footpaths, trailing stars in our wake…we smiled through screams at the shock of frozen waves, salt air and our bodies looped… …maidens were we, bonded with our sisterhood, declared within a cummings parenthetical rite… …there is a love greater than the romantic, there is a hope greater than the outlived…it was in that laugh, in a simple reaction…I exist in that womb, a bygone bliss I thought extinct…I am a clothed bread rising…and that is enough…

E.A. O'Connell