Poetry by Lily Valentine
I’ve been growing out my body hair and thinking about painting. A smudge of dark in the underarm, on the foot. Now every time I look at my armpits I think about dirt and dark paint and I feel a little more self-important.
How do you unwrap a present? How do you unpack a suitcase in a hotel room? I can’t decide if the joy of a clean room is making it dirty, and every time we get into an unmade bed we get to deflower an object.
One of my earliest memories: my two-year-old cousin eating soil from my backyard, my aunt screaming at him, and my mom yelling at her. “It’s healthy,” my mom says. “It has nutrients.” Not much later my brother licks candy off the movie theater floor and my mom pretends he isn’t her kid because at that moment it is just too exhausting. I’d be exhausted too if I had three kids and always needed the floors clean. She’d be horrified if she saw my armpits.
What is more nostalgic than anything is my dad’s truck. The whole thing smells like sawdust and is covered in a layer of silt. He has plastic gallon jugs of water that are days old and scalding hot. After he drove me home from soccer practice I used to sit in his car forever, think about nothing, take a sharpie and color my nails black.
I wish I had that time still, to think about nothing, I wish I didn’t feel like I needed to clean my floors.
Lily Valentine is a creative writer born in Boulder, Colorado. She attended Kenyon College as an English major and graduated in 2019. Currently, Lily lives in Chicago and works as a middle school English teacher. She writes poetry and short prose.
Arcturus 