2023 Poetry Runner-Up: "first love" by Abi Whitney

Photo Credit: Miryam León, obtained and licensed through Unsplash.

first love

first love:

my treehouse—a squat little room in the sky
where i made my meals
out of milkweed pods and sour yellow flowers
breathed in the pollen filled air
and did a lot of thinking

mosquitoes laid eggs
in the deep sink of the plastic kitchenette
after a heavy rain
and with sick fascination
i watched the larva squirm
hundreds of tiny white pills
dancing in the sink
even after dad told me
to dump the water

guilt used to rest on my shoulders
like an unwelcome friend
when things were more than just things
and orders were the foundation of life
and my safety net

i built forts with my picture books
opened the shiny pages and lined
them up in a crooked circle
like a fairy ring
i stacked thin books on top
and laid my head under the roof
and did a lot of thinking

the tree and i grew with time
but the house stayed the same
stuck, and unchanging
thick screws that held it up
were swallowed by the tree
that couldn’t help but get bigger
the pudgy bark oozed sap
around the screws and
dripped like blood
down the trunk

dad said the house was bad for the tree
and because his word was law
i believed him
my old friend lifted its mangy head
and i pitied the poor swollen tree
dad tore down the house
but left the screws

living things keep growing
even if you don’t want them to
and as i got taller so did the screws
until they were so high, i could barely see them
once the heavy house was gone
my oak stopped bleeding

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Abi Whitney is a junior double majoring in Creative Writing and Spanish. She is from Overland Park, Kansas. She is involved with K-State Libraries Ambassadors and works at the Sunderland Foundation Innovation Lab. In her free time, she likes to obsess over The Hunger Games and Pride and Prejudice, as well as work on her writing.