Re: How Are You? ~ prose poem by Sutton Revell

Sometimes there is summer. Sometimes there’s an episode of Lost, but only a moment, the smallest moment, where mangoes are bountiful, the music triumphs, the moment where a castaway and a beach resort have few degrees of separation. Sometimes I think Lost is something I should mention in a poem, an ABC drama could somehow have some cosmic beauty and sometimes I repeat so much the repetition becomes meaningless the repetition becomes meaningless. Sometimes.

Sometimes we go down to the beach and we look at the water and we see the plankton bioluminescent each time a wave comes crashing down. They crash and I remember our traditions, freezing beaches, lifeguard towers. I smell November and someone says the plankton came from Australia, they came from the future, some joke about time zones but I don’t know why anyone would want to return to today.

Sometimes I sit and I watch an episode of Lost, thinking she would love this, she being me, me being 12, me grasping at models of humanity to figure out which one I would follow, as if the tracks hadn’t already been bolted down. I never much cared for practice but even when I’m crashing into the sand, wearing down the edges of my island, I hope I glow.

Right now I am scrolling, staring at pictures of the ocean trying to remember the feeling of sand caught in cuffed jeans and most of the time I am crashing, shrapnel, bloody, crashing, save me, crashing, crashing, crashing

but sometimes there is summer.

Sutton Revell might be a cowboy. She is from Los Angeles, CA and is currently studying Dramatic Writing and Film at New York University. She has forthcoming work in The B’K.