Mourning Dove
By Savannah Brantley
Morning sun swallows her room at
6 a.m in the summer;
so winter was always my favorite. A cold
blue cavern we would hibernate in, like
the inside of an indigo marble.
June heats the ground under us, stirs us
like cicadas in the seventeenth year.
Shivering from soft earth.
She holds me differently too. It’s looser,
like we’re melting and
falling apart.
I usually come home in Autumn.
And when I find the door in August,
my flowers always stand in salutation
on my dresser.
She picked them for me.
They wiggle and morph
my reflection in the mirror behind them. Like
a disruption in a puddle,
rippling what I see.
The dawn stretches over my wall,
stable and immortal as it basks against
my window pane. The flowers bow. The
petals wilting pitifully,
sagging over the vase rim.
The week passes by my soles and
the hydrangeas are the only ones left alive;
The camellia and aster died around them.
I’ve stopped smelling her when
I think of her spread-mouth smile.
The butterflies have stopped coming, and
I hardly want to hear her breathe.
The bittersweetness she lays on my tongue
doesn’t grow here. A mold not in these parts,
no burnt caramel taste in my throat.
I want to stay where she doesn’t exist.
I can pretend everything that came with her
has left me to ruminate in what is my own,
once I’ve crawled away from the cave.
To my mother (s)
My name is Savannah Brantley and I’m a 2021 graduate from Stivers School for the Arts in Dayton, Ohio. Come fall I’ll be attending Ohio Wesleyan University as a major in Creative Writing. I get most of my inspiration from my surroundings and love building up characters through their perceptions of the world and dynamics with others. I have a soft spot for using lots of imagery and searching for meaning in otherwise minuscule subjects. I hope to join the Peace Corps when I graduate college in 2025 and pursue a career in technical writing when I return to the states. That being said, my ultimate goal is to be able to publish at least one collection of my work someday.