It will never be enough
How many streaks of hair
A woman can pull from her hair
Before she runs out of snow
When the clock resets before the alarm can ring
I’m reminded
How old I’ve grown
My arms have seen years of feverish dreams
My legs know promises never kept
And my heart forgives, and my mind forgets
But the body remembers
I held Grandma’s hand through the garden
The crevices between stones beneath my bare feet
I never wore shoes
My feet came home blackened with Grandma’s joy
Calling my Poppy, asking if I could stay with her for the night
We’d watch the stars from her porch
Land of Stories clutched in my left hand
My hand stretched past Neverland to Red Riding Hood’s kingdom
Grandma bought them behind Grandpa’s back
Those books are bound by her bond to my innocence
Because I never knew how he’d have yelled
Whether she’d hide
If Grandma’s heart bled more than her body
Grandma cried
When she saw her stories across my skin
Like she stared Death in the face again
Like he’d taken his scythe through my legs
The only time I’d see her cry
We were children then
My poems were elastic and pillowy when they broke
Spilled.
We were children when
The clock struck
Out.
When I get up
To grow up
But we were children then
And we are children now
Because every year is another wound
Because every candle is another smile swallowed down
And I will never be more alone
Than when I look the world in the eyes
And tell her that her daughter
Is gone.
“Winter came”
“I couldn’t find her beneath all that snow.”
I’m sorry, and I don’t know who took her
She melted into Winter, hair the same shade of grief
“She’s getting old anyway—
You know this.’’
“She felt it.”
All she could talk about was the ice in her hair
She’d pull and pull at it, but—
I couldn’t find her beneath
All that
Snow.
—
Lauren Lin is a freshman at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. A native of Burlingame, California, she served as the Inaugural Burlingame-Hillsborough Youth Poet Laureate and San Mateo County Youth Poetry Ambassador. She is also a two-time Youth Speaks poetry slam winner and founder of Words for Change, a coalition of young writers and activists eager to spur social change with written and spoken language. Her work appears in The Offing, Entanglements (Hunger Button Books, 2022), Quilted Voices (Poetry Nation, 2023), and the 2023 YoungArts Anthology, among other publications.
