Writer’s Spotlight: Alexandra Gaboury
“Alex is a second-year Creative Writing and Psychology double major. When not writing, reading, studying, or drinking coffee, she can be found taking care of her plants, embroidering, baking, and drinking more coffee. She enjoys books that smell old and musty and coffee that tastes like battery acid.”
Ground Control by Alex Gaboury
Ground Control
Take me away
For the stars look very different today
There is a sun in my pocket
Slowly testing the weight of a denim stitch un
Broken in spite of the self-destructing supernova of a stolen star. I’ve pocketed It for a rainy day, shoved it deep into a coffin
Where the daylight quizzes and caresses the pocket
Of forgetting, pounding its stevia sweet fists against the light-washed walls Until it bleaches past, rushing, running, ripping past a pocket of thrice washed love Notes and I am
Falling, an umbilical cord pulling back to a landscape void
Of bleeding band-aids and salty streams, where nothing hurts, where I am un Broken. I am winning a game of tag, falling backwards behind rusting blue slides where all The kids with friends hurl each other down burning plastic, grinning, as they crash into the surface.
Ground Control
Take me away
For I look very different today.
I am a cocoon in a stratosphere of technicolor hues, papered container burning at impact in a
streaming line of fire, inside
There lies not a butterfly but an incorporeal
Child, who would startle if she ever caught my bleary, bloodshot, eyes in a midnight mirror. So as my face opens and slowly fills with sunshine, branding a crescent into my cheeks, burning my dimples, I realize with a shaky exhale
That this forgotten child’s smile quakes the same as mine, blood pouring out at the seams
until we’re no longer
Anemic. We are un
Broken.
Ground Control
Take me away
For I am very different today.
She is burning up, igniting her paper eyelids and her plastic heart, scarred Melting all but her saccharine smile, so sweet she becomes
Caramel. She is a child of gamma rays, organs replaced with exploding
Particles. Two becoming one in a blinding, blistering ring of watery morning coffee, grounds
leached of color, thrown aside
To rot.
Ground Control
Take her away
For the sun is very different today.
The smell is revolting, like the smell of fingers brushing but never grasping that door knob to
Wonderland
So carefully, tearfully, painfully, I stick my shaking fingers out, submerging them into the breath Of ozone, and tear away the sun that has wound its way around her veins So her blood is bleeding gold and her heart is breaking apart at the seams, drowning in starlight, Breaking into a grave and ripping apart stitches
As a pocket becomes a hole.
And finally our feet touch the ground
And she cries out in a rush of human
From broken bones from large stones and bruising skin from thorny sticks.
She reaches out the palm of her hand, grasping the torn ends of my heart
The edges of my lungs
And out rushes all my ultraviolet expectations
Until two becomes one
Grounded.