Dark Spring

We drink the warm lake water with our hands, we call it tea.
We wander down hallways, try to fill vacant star space
in our current universe. You wrap your hand around us, look
in disbelief at our bright glowing cheeks, tampered rooms
where clusters on the wall explain how trees grow in patterns.

We drink the warm lake water with our hands, we call it tea
and look at things differently now, like the new lush scattering
at the dappled end of day, the light, summer almost gone
heavy with the possibility and impossibility of truly knowing someone.
Now everything is about the rose hue that has set where clusters

hang from the wall and explain how trees grow in patterns
while the drying hills hold static. Through a dull fog, the seven
shingled houses emerge around the lip of the graying
ocean the way leaves do, but blackening, as with a certain
knowing the hardening seasons will live quietly in our minds.

The hardening seasons live quietly in our minds, they claim
the sunken sky in unforgivable brilliance but still we walk
around the lip and possibility of falling never so much as we do
now the rose hue has set the hardening seasons fast and quietly
where clusters on the wall in our minds explain how trees grow.

Carolina Casabal was born and raised in NYC and received her MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. Her work has also appeared in Cordella Magazine & Small Orange Journal.