My face turns over in a bed of fire;
half-sculpted bronze thoughts.
Two swallowtail butterflies
try to fly together on a beach;
only one has a broken wing,
the pattern falls short.
The doctors know about this;
the pattern falling short.
My therapist puts her hands
on one side of the room and
moves them over to the other.
One side is night fire, the other:
pure daisy. She wants me away
from night fire.
Annette Giacometti
found fakes that mimicked
her husband’s work,
a dead artist’s dismay.
I feel to be a missing figure
who walked into a fire,
stood, and burned.
I made snow angels
over a daisy field for hours,
named each angel
after my grandmother;
this is where the line
of the room begins to blur.
My upturned angel earrings
never caught fire by morning.
I never do catch fire.
Neither do Giacometti’s protected people;
though they may be burning inside,
naming this sensation light.
Chasing this burning in a circular motion.
I do not need to find this light as I am alive;
bargaining with higher powers
during hours when I could be sleeping.
The pattern still falls short.
I thought my mother
was saying a prayer;
she was fixing her hair.
My identity slipped out of my mouth
due to a loose mentality, and
a four-year wait to speak mattered less;
my mother pulled over the car and
said she loved me. I was on fire inside,
but daisies flooded the car and never burned.
After death, the potential of new clay
for a man Giacometti destroyed and missed.
Kailie Foley is a nineteen-year-old poet from Illinois who loves to write about nature, mental health, and grief. Her prose poem Home for Sale, In the Summer, After the Funeral is in Impostor: A Poetry Journal. She hopes to convey her heart space through writing as it helps her heal.