it’s easy to forget the good when there’s just so little of it: a fragment

                                                
_________________, but there’s more than that. There’s the smell of molten blueberries as the skin of her belly rubs against the newly varnished armoire. The taste of her fingers after rubbing fresh basil leaves and dirt between them. The feeling of her sleeping hair dancing its sharp edges against your forearms until it burns. The sound you almost didn’t make when she asked about your favourite place, when you wanted to say beside you, but thought better of it. In this moment, you remember those fleeting softs. Yet, when she comes back to you, all you see is _______, ________________________, and then ___________________.

Siarra Riehl (she/her) lives and creates on Treaty Six land in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan with her wife and two cats. A transdisciplinary writer, performer, and teacher, she holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Siarra’s fiction received an honourable mention in AWP’s 2020 Intro Journals Project and has appeared in Zone 3, Fatal Flaw, Beyond Words, and elsewhere. Embodiment, magic, and queerness are at the heart of her writing and research.