Poetry by Althea Downing-Sherer

      Heath Cajandig CC




Snowmelt & Starlink

Act I

Like shards of ice,
I am only pixelation

after her.
Forces are personified 

when she picks me up.
Magnetism a cradle, luck a harness lifting

me over the frosted driveway.
I’ve only seen her car in the dark

so I don’t recognize it
as I enter this vessel of movement.

She tells me it’s a good car 
and I assume she means morally.

Muscle memory,
like the ocean between my ribs, 

the branches of my bloodstream, 
gravity’s hand pressed into my trachea.

I am perpetually glitched.
I am simply sinking.

I watch her eyeshadow shimmer
and I’m breathing in snowflakes like lakewater.

                                                                                                                                                                              I melt in a way that exceeds language.

Act II

I wish on Starlink,
evoking a meaningless yearning

that will echo 
between me and Elon Musk

for at least an eternity.
I finally see him

across the street
and his torso is doughy and pale.

“Elon,” I ask
“Why are you in your swim trunks?

It’s freezing.”
His cage of a stomach shakes gelatinously.

Streetlamps cast shadows
on the jawline he paid a surgeon for.

His hair implants tremble
like frantic whispers.

“It’s always summer
where I go,”

he finally replies.
He clutches a handful of snow

and sure enough,
it begins to trickle down his bare arm.

                                                                                                                                                             I calmly observe this non-lunar phase change.


Act III

She speeds on the way home. 
I cover my eyes.

                                                                                                                                                                                  The fields are a desert of snowmelt.




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exegesis

morning before the memorial (late july)
sinead o’connor echoing through sunlit rooms (i am indulgent as ever) piña fraise la croix and book spine broken (i imagine how you’d call this erotica “profound”) george seurat print in goodwill frame (i have some fixation on Costco flowers and yesterday i learned that one of the last times he went out, before chemo made him weak, he brought home flowers for mary. she got mad at him for spending money on something so frivolous and they fought. isn’t that love?) too-big dress makes my chest look flat. god, i really can write about anything. 

3 weeks after (mid august)
(the most masculine thing about me is that i’m an artist) while august makes you melt i become socially cynical. watch the sunset in the walmart parking lot and cry when i touch ceramic. (it’s not metaphorical, just physiological) tie ribbons to my belt loops and dismiss intentions until i am a ruined garden, overwatered with praise. the thing is that you are the word. (i am the reaction) i picture you laughing at ghost stories over the iowa river. (your thighs are red hours after they scrape the cement).

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​Althea Downing-Sherer is a highschool senior from Iowa and an incoming first-year at Barnard College. She is an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers Studio and the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop. She reads for Polyphony Lit and The Dawn Review. She has work published or forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Blue Marble Review, Origami Lit, and more. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Writing Awards.
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