Marbles
By Isabella Cruz Pantoja
April 15, 2023
April 15, 2023
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I’ve considered the peaches split in half
by someone else’s clever knife work and the yapping dog’s wet nose, colder than my own palms but not always. I’ve considered the fig tree which has been cut down into just another brown, nondescript trunk, but which I know will return fragrant and full in a year or two. I’ve considered my own unluckiness. How I’ve grown tall enough to carry it softly feeling only a tender ache in my arms from the bittersweet reminder of it, my flawed charm. How often have I tripped over the very same rug? And still, thought to myself, I will not do it again. I know where every raised corner lies, the shoddy work that has not withstood time well and it shows. My memory will not fail me again. And once more, it does. Of course, my brashness is relentless. Of course, the grass remains green pretty much everywhere, unless there’s a drought, unless it’s winter. I must have been been about seven or eight years old when some boys at school brought marbles to the playground, a clinking, knocking oddity. They huddled over them so closely I could hardly catch a glimpse of what lay on the ground. I did not like them, and in return, was not well liked either, but I stretched my neck and stood on my toes and swayed from side to side until I saw it, one single marble, light blue and wispy like the ocean on a perfect summer morning right where it meets the horizon, like the sweetest dream you’ve ever had, only a few moments before waking when all you’ve ever wished for seems so close and it’s so silly to think it was ever that far, you can feel it, right there, can’t you? A breath on your cheek, not quite touching but, isn’t it? I shoved my way into that huddle. I didn’t even get to play, the boys were so mean, but I picked up that little glass ball and tried my best to memorize it, turned it over in my hands until I could barely feel it, the marble, it got so warm. |
Isabella Cruz Pantoja is a Brazilian writer currently based in São Paulo. Her poems have appeared in Plainsongs Poetry Magazine, Protean Magazine, Tint Journal, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @isapetal or at her local grocery store having epiphanies by shining piles of clementines.