The girls in your phone are night-mode golden.
In the heat of summer, they are bikinis and bones, swimming
in the blue light like water falling backwards to Heaven.
This holy light washes them clean, their beauty a language you cannot speak.
At night, jealous, you take a seam ripper to your softest parts,
Dive into the wreckage and try to name it girl. Tilt your phone,
Pucker your lips, take a selfie, make a duck face, #2014 #hashtag.
Your life only your life if it is captioned, your body composed only of want.
So you take their empty stomachs and let hollow air swell in your grip.
You kiss your own open palms like a first boyfriend, searching. Kiss the cold mirror,
bruise your lips purple trying to find something worth worshiping.
You wear their faces, halving their heads like oranges. You hold
Your phone, click smile click tilt click hashtag click post click like
See: the glitter, the cherry-red lip gloss. The shutter, flashing in morse-code prayer
For pixelation, all the laws of physics undone. To be one of those girls,
Floating in the light.
—
Miceala Morano is a writer from the Ozarks whose work is published or forthcoming in Berkeley Fiction Review, Eunoia Review, Kissing Dynamite, The Shore, Gone Lawn, and more. Find her on Twitter @micealamorano and at micealamorano.carrd.co.
Photography by: Marcus Loke
