your mouth is still open but your breath is not warm. it comes out cold like the fog. it is raining inside your mouth so you cannot scream even though it is your birthday wish. your legs begin to fold under you like a deer. I try to help you up by tying silver birthday balloons to your wrists. they look like little moons but they will not hold you. I will carry you home and you will not be found wanting. when my head is underneath your shirt it is like being under the blankets in my childhood bed. after I leave your mother will knock 3 times on the side door and your father will come out to walk with her. when they walk into the dark you will wonder about me. you will look at the space between your tongue and the moon and say ah what a terrible waste.
Julia Rox is a poet from Nashville, TN. She is a senior at Lipscomb University, studying English: Writing and Philosophy. Her work explores themes of creation and destruction--the creation and destruction we engage in with language as well as the creation and destruction we engage in daily with ourselves and our identity. Her work has been published in On the Cusp Zine, Fractal Magazine, and the Lipscomb College of Arts and Sciences Magazine.