Samuel Waits
Samuel waits for a girl who writes love poems to colors–
a girl who wears rain boots to the beach.
Propped against his car, he waits
until he can see his pulse beneath
his tattoos. Then he calls her.
If he’s waited long enough, she’ll answer.
Some days, she’s tucked beneath
a willow tree, counting the leaves until she
gets to a million, then begins again.
Others, she’s following a family of geese
to their nest, trying to turn her hair to feathers
and her heart to a flight pattern worth following.
Still more, she’s staring at the sky ‘til the clouds
turn to dirt and her mind can finally walk
on its own two feet again.
Samuel knows all of this.
He knows her soul belongs to unkempt grass
and her toenails will never be painted
and she doesn’t know the first thing about
Romantic lit but her cigarette flickering
in the 2 a.m. blackness is close enough for him.
She says she’ll never have words for the poems
she writes on his too-thin skin,
but she’s close enough for him.
By Darcy Vines
Biography:
Darcy Vines is a 20 year old free verse poet and freelance journalist who has been writing since the early days of her teenage angst. While occasionally covering feminist film festivals and office furniture conventions, she prefers to write about falling in and out of love too easily, gender and sexuality, and her dog named Huckleberry Finn. She cites Kurt Vonnegut, Betty Smith, Richard Siken, and Andrea Gibson as the loves of her literary life and her biggest inspirations. In her free time, she is a senior in the Insignis Honors Program at Aquinas College and studies English, journalism, and writing, all while staring down the barrel of law school applications. She is a staff writer for her college’s newspaper The Saint, and has been published in the first volume of Literary Sexts as well as the 26th and 27th editions of The Sampler. In 2014 and 2015, she was a top ten finalist from Aquinas College in the Academy of American Poets Student Poetry Prize. Someday, she hopes to write something that makes sense. Until then, you can find her anywhere you can also find a good dirty chai.