Wedding Song (excerpt)

There are
so many things I haven’t yet done. Your hands
moving up my spine. It’s been so long
since someone touched me. It’s alright, I hear you saying,
look how the sky has changed. I look up.
It has.

It has, and I think it’s winter now, though I don’t know
enough to be able to tell. You hold open the car door for me,
laugh when I thank you. I want to kiss you. I want to kiss you,
your orange hair, your willowy limbs, the way you don’t look away.
I want you to hold me. I want you to remember me. I want to
forget some things and learn others, I want to shed fear like
an old skin, I hate it, I hate it, look now, the sky’s changing again,
the water’s lapping at the dock, I’m tossing my head back
behind a low-hanging branch and finding leaves in my lap,
it’s nearly raining again, and I want to kiss you. You touch my cheek
with your lips. Un adios argentino, you say. I only look at you.

Noelle McManus is a twenty-year-old writer from Long Island, New York who studies linguistics, Spanish, and German. Her work has been published in The Women's Review of Books and UMass Amherst's Jabberwocky.