Old Friends

By Charlotte Iannone

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Eyes shut: Earth has unraveled into dreams.

I talk to you in all of them.

I tell the truth.

In the streets at night

I see a thousand twitching nerves like rope

roiling to a needle on the wall.

Then a thousand invisible snakes exploding out

across the continent, into trenches of sea.

My finger meets the needle—it bleeds.

Too many tomes of us—too many inken deeds.

The handwriting—all of a lowly writer—blurs

into mismemory.

Seawater has soaked the pages

(I omit the nights

I found you hovering over the basin,

dunking them. Some nights

it was me).

Perhaps we are beyond saving.

The shame of admitting it:

I will no longer climb

when you call,

if you have ever, like a child in the dark,

called out to me at all.

If it was not always

just a spiderweb of dreams.

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Charlotte Iannone is an emerging writer whose work revolves around her upbringing on Long Island and the complicated nature of families. She just completed her first novel, a family epic centered around a real-life historical family that lived in East Williston, New York. At Bowdoin College, she was the Editor-in-Chief of The Bowdoin Review and Poet Laureate of the Peucinian Society. In her free time, she plays soccer competitively, reads classic novels, and serves her local community as a volunteer firefighter.