Liminal

The smudged sky is a slick acrylic handswipe 

Its color not quite purple, not quite gray, not quite blue 

It’s the lone dazed March in clothes that are not quite warm enough. 

I almost shiver. 

By now, the path begins to light up from glistening lampposts, 

Leaning in. Do you have a secret for me? 

The defiant sky resists uniformity, resists definition. 

Let me be middling, it says, darkening. 

Let me have time before I must be purple or gray or blue. 

I try not to treat its pleas with empathy. 

Instead, I turn my thoughts towards growing hunger. 

Toward the food growing cold in the plastic green to-go box 

with a lid that doesn’t quite shut. 

I carry it back down the path to my room. By then it will be dinner time. 

By then it will be night. 

Laurel Marchaven is a sophomore Communications Major at Eastern University. She loves poetry, strangely-shaped teapots, and hoarding notebooks like a dragon.