Rylie Martin

The moon spends every night borrowing someone else’s light. It never calls itits own. Only we do. The mountain never claims the snow. It simply wears it for a while. Every spring, the trees receive their leaves. Every autumn, they give them back. They hold them through sunlight, storm, and summer, then loosen their grip when the season asks. Love wasn’t something I lost. It was something I was trusted with for a while. We were not Evergreen. But that doesn’t mean we were any less arboreal. We...

I thought veils were lifted to reveal a future. I was wrong. Sometimes they’re lifted to reveal the truth. Devotion, it seems, doesn’t always receive permission to stop. For a while, I kept waiting for the current to change its mind. But you cannot reason with a stream. You can ask it to dry, but it will always remember downhill without forgetting where it came from. You can ask the beaver to dam it all for you, but that won’t make him start building. Maybe that is healing: accepting that...

Maybe you mistook me for a pebble, meant to be skipped. Now that you’ve cracked me wide open, can you see I was always a geode? My toothbrush still lives beside yours. Because every time I left, I never imagined not returning. I told you I was a boomerang. You never disclosed to me that you were a frisbee. I wonder whether you’ve moved it. Or whether it’s still waiting better than I am. Your silence feels like a reckoning. The bird I gave you still uses your shoulder as a lean-to. A little...