Grace Yannotta: How Does It Feel
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
Somewhere under the yellow tent
daddy long legs never
scared me because they
seemed like friends. you
can’t see their faces like you
can spiders. but honestly
I can’t remember if I let them
crawl around in my hand
when I was a little girl.
I hope I did.
it seems like something
that would have made me
very happy.
the light from my laptop in the december dark permanently damaged my eyes
Sometimes the moon
is cold.
Sometimes she glares
at you from
the trilateral pineapple
slice windows
in your grandmother’s
loft and you
are reminded pitifully of
the measly
kidney-stone-hunger-strike-
throbbing-pebble
desperation.
Or, rather, the
the
I don’t know, is
there a non-cliche way
of phrasing, paraphrasing,
pressing
your pupil to the
ink of a book and
mouthing the
words, tasting
the mimicked laughter
on your lips…
How does
it feel to be
known?
Wings, Waxed
It was to burst forth
in a loving phrase,
sweating Pallas from an angsty,
knit-heavy Jupiter.
I was supposed to be
something once.
Glorious, perhaps!
Glorious, once.
Suburban Icari
are not Icari at all –
Carolina skies
are always
homecoming-blue;
Flight is unnecessary
when an imagination
is so explosive that
you already hold
the clouds – yes,
right there! In your
lined palm. But the
sun will taunt you
senseless until
you finally succumb.
Grace Yannotta is a sophomore at UNC, double majoring in English and History. She has work published or forthcoming in Revue Post, Pider Mag, and Gravity of the Thing, and is an inaugural winner of the Zachary Doss Friends in Letters Memorial Fellowship. She is also an associate editor and writer at Limeaid, as well as an Editorial Coordinator at Poets Reading the News. You can find her on Twitter @lgyanno.
