Nineteen tastes like black cherries
and wrapping the stem around your tongue
because someone told you once that it proved
you were a good kisser but they didn’t tell you
the girl would bite. Let me try again.
Nineteen is wanting to jump off the building
just to know what it feels like but
your body keeps interrupting and the phone
keeps ringing. It’s an aching so deep
and so long it carves a hole in your stomach,
so you fill it with sunflowers and when you speak
sunrays drop out of your mouth. What I’m saying
is that growing means certain suns in you die
so new galaxies shine out of the black stains on your hands.
Ivy Marie is an emerging writer from Georgia, where she is studying Creative Writing and English Literature at Mercer University. Her written work has appeared in The Dulcimer, The Atlanta Review, and at the SoCon Undergraduate Research Forum. She is also the 2019 winner of the Dan Veach Prize for Younger Poets. She is an intern with Macon Magazine; a lead writer for The Cluster, Mercer’s newspaper; a preceptor for English courses at Mercer; and a Maconand San Antonio-based photographer.
