Someplace where life is old
I sat with twenty girls in a field.
When we sang “Taps” at dusk
our voices echoed against
the graying Virginia mountains,
and that was power
enough to last me till next July.

We walked down to the ravine
after dark, humming John Denver,
getting gravel in our shoes, and I imagined
my mountain mama all around me: the hills
that ebbed and flowed, rose and dipped their way
across the horizon were her head,
her breast, her stomach.

On the tennis courts at midday I imagined
I was resting in the valley of her palm
and how it would be when her hair
turned red, fell out in October
while I was too far away to see it.
I fell asleep in a soccer field once and woke disoriented
because the stars had moved across the sky

and maybe that’s why, when nine summers over
I turn down comedy night in Brooklyn
to lie beneath a tree, I gaze at its tender underside
and get the feeling that this is not unlike viewing a belly button
or the fragile seam of skin where an armpit
meets a shoulder, a secret crease of body
its owner rather not reveal.

Giselle Silla (she/her) is a sophomore at Barnard College majoring in Urban Studies and minoring in German.