She fell in love with him while they walked
barefoot through a blueberry patch,
during a Vermont summer that bleached
the skies and glassed
the air in sepia-hued laziness–
a film reel memory.

Their feet and their tongues were stained
violet
and she fell in love with his toes
“finger toes”
she called them;
her laugh
carried high up through the pale yellow
afternoon and tickled
the wind and the trees into laughing
too. He fell into the
glistening gold of sunlight bouncing
off the glee in her eyes and
I doubt he ever climbed out of that
wishing well
(although to be fair, he never did try very hard to escape).

She wore a Dorothy blue skirt straight out
of a romance novel and
nonsense tripped and stumbled over the
tectonic plates of her lips
(she rambled when she got nervous)
he watched the way her shadow moved
willowed and spritely
how the breeze tangoed with her
skirts and the tips of her hair
how her chest heaved and trembled when
her breath raced faster and her
lungs could not keep up
(rabbit air, human lungs
like time to living, always out of reach).

Indigo splattered field
gold studded day
they held hands with nail beds painted
ripe sugar sweet and
fell for toes and into wishing wells,
both frightened by the way
all of their organs fell into their stomachs
each time their minds met through irises.

They were ionic bonds completing
each other–
holding the world together.

Hana Tzou is a dancer, a poet, a coffee addict, a city girl, a future English major, the one you go to with homework questions, someone who puts pink raincoats on her beagle, the grammar police, a candle connoisseur, the Queen of Sestinas, and a chopstick master. She doesn’t like being called “Hannah” and loves to procrastinate AP homework by writing. You can find her work in Stone Soup, Teen Ink, Germ Magazine, and elsewhere.