Two poems

Fountain 

You seated me at the fountain 
to watch you throw small stones,  
like useless buttons, into the water.  
You were older than me, and kept  
forgetting my name and then  
remembering it, suddenly, like a taste.  
It was then you became the object  
of all my desire. Long after you left  
I coveted the shape of your body:  
your round waist, your dark, weeping hair.  
I sat and thought about the sounds  
you made when you were laughing—
when your eyes, greenly serious,  
turned me over and over like a wish.

Nadya 

At the end of the story: your hand on my heartless heart, sinking me, helplessly, into the
water. It happened years ago—rather than falling for you in an ordinary way I doubled your
body with my own; your voice, and your way of standing. Made it like breathing to hate me,
as effortless as opening your eyes, in the morning, to my face. Those days I became
enchanted with my carpet, walked miles just to find a goddamn drink. I watched your
comings and goings through my window, this character you had made of yourself and also of
me. A lake around your head like a halo—how deep, I didn’t know. You turned even the air
around you a dark, melancholic blue, almost purple, like the saddest kind of flower. Then our
boat overturned—Nadya, hand on my heartless heart; you held me under the water. You were
the water, touching me everywhere. You were the pond-lily. When we washed ashore,
pine-needled and exhausted, everything I had stolen from you left me like a fever burning
out, like wildfire over slash. It was much simpler to be yours, like looking into a fogged
mirror. After that, everything I felt, I felt with a frightening clarity. Even my dying, which
had not yet come to pass.

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Maia Armistead is a poet and student originally from Hamilton. She has been published in such places as Starling, Mayhem, Sweet Mammalian, a fine line, and The Spinoff. She is one of the founding editors of Symposia Magazine.