Charissa Roberson

In Your Lovely and Hopefully Long Life

 will you hold a strip of pungent orange
peel between your teeth and taste the 
spray of tiny vestibules burst bitter across 
your tongue?
will you scrape clay from a decaying 
lakebed and press it between your 
fingertips and part them ochre-stained?
will you close your eyes in a summer wind
for the barest moment, palm resting on the steering
wheel, jagged sheafs of rock and roll slicing
past your ears like shafts
of sunlight flashing in the side mirror —
what will fill that cavity
below your collarbone, will make you
murmur this is it?
you’ll choose, perhaps, a house
with a shining lawn, or an apartment
crammed between rancid alleys, or
a room in a house on a hill by the coast
where they pay you to write stories 
for their children.
will you have children?
will they have children?
will your hazel eyes, like leaves just turning 
from golden to brown, live on in the faces 
of yet-uncomprehended humans,
another new life to unravel in gleaming 
threads —
will they place the rind between their 
teeth, close their eyes for the briefest 
moment to feel the teeter of life and death 
beneath their toes?
will they, too, imagine themselves 
immortal?

Charissa Roberson (she/her) is a recent graduate from Roanoke College with a bachelor's degree in creative writing and French and a concentration in film. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in several places online, including the Elevation Review, NOVUS Literary Journal, Burnt Pine Magazine, and Manawaker Studio's Flash Fiction Podcast. She has also authored two collections of short stories and a booklet on the history of her community. When not dwelling in imaginary worlds, she loves exploring the real one, making and watching films, learning languages, and playing Irish tunes on her fiddle.