Gossamer – Ottavia Paluch
There is a sharpness in things that are softest to the touch of a hand soaked with any liquid If it is water then I know it will never belong to me and if it is blood then I must question who it came from Or how blood is just blood until it’s lava and it pours down from the volcanoes of my face Whenever I look for different things to breathe in I always leave with a spider’s tangled breath My emotions are highest when my nose can barely breathe and yet the air is all around me or that I’m empty when I look at the glass and forget that there could ever be water The emptiness is most hollow when I can take a bite out of a tree and mistake it for gossamer Had I been a spider I would trap my problems into a web full of things worth stressing over A language that teaches me how to speak or that tells me there is nothing worth saying Instead I am a fish in a hollowed-out sea and the water is swimming towards me Like a fish in a hollowed-out sea I wash myself in my own innocent saliva It tangles like a web in my throat and covers all the things my tongue forgot how to say
Ottavia Paluch is a disabled high school student from Ontario, Canada. A featured Gigantic Sequins Teen Sequin for 2018, her work is published or forthcoming in Four Way Review, Kissing Dynamite, Room, and Ghost City Review, among other places. She’s also an alumnus of the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program.