there isn’t a version of this I can see ending
happy even in my head we are doomed
to spend forever in that storage closet yes
we are in love but eventually the taste
of your strawberry lip gloss goes rancid
in my mouth and the zipper on my dress
rusts shut and no matter how much we try
to convince each other that our love transcends
hunger we starve to death all the same no
one notices we’re gone for months years even
but when they do they find what’s left
of my biology notebook seeped with just enough
acetic acid to make my marginal drawings
of us at an altar unrecognizable to even your mother
the morgue buries us in the same unmarked
grave our bodies lay rotting unadorned
unremembered beneath the soccer field
in death I rest in secret but you rest easy
knowing that the evidence of our transgressions
will decay until there is nothing
left for the anthropologists to find
Neva Ensminger-Holland (they/she) is a recent graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy, and is an incoming freshman at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. They are a YoungArts award winner, and an American Voices nominee in the Scholastic Art and Writing Competition. Their work is published or forthcoming in the Interlochen Review, One Art, The Albion Review, and the YoungArts anthology. In their free time, they enjoy wearing ripped tights in the winter, watching Gilmore Girls with their roommate, and hot-gluing the straps back on their platform Mary-Janes.