Reasons To Be Happy:

1. Dead trees still stand and so can you.
2. You have five fingers on each hand. One day those fingers will travel from your lap to someone else’s and that person will know all the bad stuff and still want to kiss you. 
3. Seasons are guaranteed when nothing else seems to be.
-

Rhye

When I'm Asked...

Winter Fog

Never let me go

I come here and imagine that this is the spot where everything I've lost since my childhood has washed out. I tell myself, if that were true, and I waited long enough, then a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger...he'd wave and maybe call. I don't let the fantasy go beyond that. I can't let it.

Conner YoungBlood

His Hands

I don’t know when the obsession began.

Perhaps two days into the start of school,
when he said hello to me for the
second time this year

and I realized that it’s not his mouth
or his eyes or even his hair.

Instead,
it’s his hands.

Long, pale, elegant things.
Wispy limbs that induce within me
the kind of longing that belongs
in a harlequin romance.

I’m not trying to be poetic,
but these hands, God, these hands.

They deserve a poem.
They deserve fifty.

The star extending outward
from the wrist bone,
empty bowls clenched around air,
oh, God.

Did I mention he plays the piano?
It would be too easy to say
“How I’d love for him to play me.”

I find myself jealous of the pianos
in the music hall, all three of them.

He can’t pass by them without touching them
and the sheer yearning on his face when he sees them
and how he steps around me if I’m closer to them
so that he can trail his fingers along the ivory keys,
play a glissando that ends on a high, clear C—

Oh, God, to be that piano.

To feel him love me: all seven octaves,
all eighty-eight keys.

— Kristina H.

Postiljonen

Sunday Nights

Under a canopy of night sky and green foliage I close my eyes, my fingertips touching the wet leaves as I walk my path home, the earth smelling of petricher.
How I love the quiescent beauty of Sunday nights when all the cars are alined in their place, construction sites deserted, restaurants with their lamps still lit in the windows as if waiting with tables set for phantom guests while all my neighbors are safe tucked in bed dreaming.
Bliss to be alone, amid this autumn scenery of fallen leaves and discarded paraphernalia traveling down the street, rustling in the wind. The city abandoned but for the sparking ghost trams, empty taxi cabs and paper carriers. I pause along the dark gated football field encircling an oasis of stars, looking up to the North Star, Big Dipper, Orion.
I remember in hospital opening my beginners guide to astronomy and tracing my fingers over the stars mapping the constellations in my mind, feeling the same light years of isolation like a lost astronaut in an alien world and wanting to go home but the dark endless space was so vast.

Its been a year long journey, I don't know yet what will become of me or if I will be cured but I am home again.