Quinn Marley Garcia: Poetry Collection

exhale the water

My mind is full of sand. I walk home at dusk and it is like the sun

is singing the ancient song of my name.

I’m quite sure I’ve lived for a hundred thousand years, I’m quite sure I’ve yet to be born–

I am old as the shells on the shore, I’m old as their mothers

and old as their children.

Do you ever wonder if ours is the only good way to live a life?

We are newborn gods, unencumbered by epithets–

I mean it as a good thing, of course: without monikers or histories we can be just be children

walking hand in hand, lying beside each other on the sand

as our shoulders thaw against the hearth, against the earth,

against the place where the story meets the flesh.

We have pressed our bodies to the sun–

We have drunk life before, and we are not yet full.

O, celestial bodies! What a beautiful time to be immortal!

Tilt the streaming beams of sun and word to our new-old lips, sip the man silly,

past the point of endurance we go and still we dream of future-past, our supplicating hands hot

on maroonish arms,

warm and burning palms that leave names scarred on our foreheads, inhale the heat until your

chest can’t hold your heart–

exhale the water. your tide is pressing out.

The light is quiet once more, dulled under an atmosphere of softly ebbing seasalt floes.

I submerge my thoughts and let the cool darkness of all the time in the world drown down those

softly

dreaming

eddies.

I am a cupful of ocean.

I am a womanful of life.

Son, sing me please, won’t you fit me together again–

my mind is full of sand, my mouth is full of water.

I am old as your myth, I am young as your world. 

eleven pm is for electric girls

listening to some smooth indigo groove

i watch the neighbors’ christmas lights go out when the pulsing orange car clock hits eleven,

the block nodding off in real time.

i watched my friend trip down a road of tears tonight,

in a movie theater

in a strip mall

off the highway

she cried.

she let me keep my head on her shoulder

even though the weight of me was an unbearable hurt.

i could feel her tears spark and shudder through her trench coat-

electrical waves of sadness.

she let me hold her hand

even though that, too, was floating beyond endurance.

when i touched our wrists together, i felt the flick flick of her heart slow to a steady pulse pulse

like the blinking of the digital dashboard clock,

and i wondered dumbly if

our hearts’ mechanical tempos were dancing together in a synchronized swing routine.

suburbia sleeps peacefully on monday nights.

at this hour, no one is thinking about the electric girls who cry in movie theaters and stare at the

void all dizzy-like.

the street lamps are neon tear stains against the night

rolling down from the great white stars to land

gently above our heads.

i tilt my seat back

and slide the moon roof open

and wait for the song to finish thrumming

and the stars to stop falling

and the secret-colored sky to swallow my electric body whole.

About the Author:

Quinn Marley Garcia (she/her) is a cowboy trapped in the body of a teenage girl. She has been telling stories since her hands were strong enough to hold a pen, and has been published in multiple literary magazines, such as The Word’s Faire, Right Hand Pointing, and The Drama Notebook. She was also the first youth playwright to have a piece virtually performed at the Little Fish Theater in Los Angeles. She is constantly filled with a yearning to ride off into the sunset, and hopes that comes through in her art.