Ode to a Treehouse   

a poem my cousin Hannah wrote

deep in the backyard jungle
Just beyond my mother’s prized tomato plants and raspberry bushes
I brush shoulders past 4, 7, and 11 year old versions of myself
Scaling the rope ladder (carefully), an expert demonstration for those behind me
Wooden walls tinged green by moss and rot
Leafy, sky-high home of séances and first kisses
Billie Holiday is barely audible through the static of your old transistor radio
Echoes haunting a childhood paradise
Past laughter and whisper soft secrets
A thousand tedious afternoons of gin rummy and daisy chains
Sweet cakes and milkshakes
Daydream dalliance, dragonfly’s delight
Our last days as children
Painted on the inside of our skin
We lay on our backs
Stretched out like laundry on the line
Stargazing through the Plexiglas roof
You say
“In 100 years, no one will remember our names but they’ll still be looking at these same stars”

childhood

I miss being small and believing the world was

 an infinite universe of potential, when your little

 it’s like  no matter how terrible things can be you

 have  this undeniable imagination that gives you 

the ability to believe in magical things and this 

resilient naive optimism that all your dreams will 

come true when your older,

 It’s not until you actually grow up that you 

begin to realize that life is never as perfect as you

 imagined however nor is it as terrible as you had 

feared, rather a compilation of mundane moments that you cease to find the 

importance of until it’s too late and they’re nothing more than distant memories.

-Alicia Carey

                                                Having a coke with you

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.

-Frank O'Hara

Ever since I was small I feel I was highly influenced by my Mum's adoration with Great Britain. As a child beginning from the age of 5 and lasting until I was teenager we would spend at least 3 weeks every summer, trading houses with a U.K family and  exploring the many unique Cultural aspects that the country had to offer. At the time I actually remember not loathing but not always enjoying every expedition that we would go on,  there's only so many museums,churches, and historical buildings you can explore with a hyper active little girl before she's had enough. However now that I'm grown, I feel nostalgic for those Family trips to Britain, maybe it's because those trips mark a time in my life when my family was all together. Either way those idealic summer trips will be ingraved in my head as such a winderful experience that I was able to parktake,