Saili Eyzell

Leila

Your heart is a lunchbox. Your heart is small. It’s strawberry pink embossed with raspberry-scented plastic. Your heart is a sour-candy five-pack, the kind I buy when I feel that the day was tasteless. I hate days that taste like nothing, I need acid or sweet in sickly intense quantities, I need artificial flavors, sugar cocaine addict addiction. You babe, all the planets parading behind your eyes, tearful nights in your sighs. The dirt that sticks to your hands when you sleepwalk at one a.m., go out in your pajamas and start digging, looking for a blue rabbit under your garden. You’ve got eyes big like a night owl, and the rays of your aura glow like a macaw. Each time you speak I hear the whispering sea and the terrible gunshots of a cruel, cold war, I hear the cool breeze on the solitary porch of a beach house and I feel the chill of an igloo on the North Pole.

I don’t know who you are, babe. I saw you in that yard, dressed in so many colors and so many shades of solid black in your gaze; I decided to count the beads of your flower bracelet. Let’s go eat lasagna downtown; let´s get to know these parks as though we’d never seen them before. You with me, I with you, both separately together, but we will be there. We’ll flood the place with questions such as why we belong to each other without knowing each other. And why we made a moment seem like forever when we took a picture together with the new Huawei that had a working camera. Isn’t it ridiculous? It had been so long since I met someone who actually wanted to take me to Saturn. Let´s go there when you get home, when you recognize the presence of something mine in the skin under your nails. Let’s find an abandoned house, not this shelter for coke heads or the homeless, and make a poem without using a single word.

Saili Eyzell (Brasil-Venezuela, 1994) studies Hispanic Literature at Universidad de los Andes. She works as a free-lance model and blogs at Doce Frambuesas since 2008. Eyzell is part of the K-Libre Artistic & Literary Collective.