by Eva Haas
In hindsight, it seems significant that you were the
first to touch me, in an abandoned & vandalized
Cold War radio station. We were young & I
unzipped your jeans against a wall splattered neon
pink. The roof collapsed & green trees growing
twisted from the scaffolding. I’d never seen life
come from metal like that, rusted girders, your
mouth a shot grazing my ear. Roots burst through
cement & we crushed new history against the old, a
trace of something for a wild animal to find. I had
your body in my hands. Sunlight fell & shattered
like pieces of a vase parents yelled at you for
breaking. Shards of it crunched beneath our feet.
You led me down a ladder into an underground
grain silo. Dark & warm as a throat painted with
people that had come & gone. I was scared & you
sang show tunes & songs from musicals. For a
second then all three of us were full.
EVA HAAS is a queer artist and poet originally from Ktaqmkuk (St. John's, Newfoundland). She is concluding her BA in Writing and History at the University of Victoria and her term as the City of Victoria's 11th Youth Poet Laureate. Her work has been a finalist for competitions at CBC, Room and Frontier, and can be found in the Malahat Review and Island Writer Magazine.
Red Cliff was edited by Azure Arther. It can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 8.2.
