A Picnic For Sappho

By Cecilia Watt

We lay in the park on an itchy blanket, unpacking our picnic basket of riches, trading silence and laughter with ease. 

When we’re done eating, we’ll lick our sticky fingers dry without worrying what the other park goers think. 

This blanket is our island, and we are its sole inhabitants. 

The victory of being in plain sight rests your head on my stomach. You drift into sleep, my knees offered up to the sun to be burned. I think I would burn for your comfort in more ways than one. 

I think of Sappho, I remember her to honour her, and us. I think of when she said:

someone will remember us.

I say:

even in another time

The rhythm of your body, however new, feels so familiar that I think I was expecting you. I know I have remembered. 

Weary battle-worn hearts of lavender and stolen kisses, and kisses stolen, tumbled through the tunnels of time, the two of us deposited onto this picnic blanket. 

We are covered in invisible bruises from the fall, none of them our own. 

Sapphos sits on my thigh, in the shape of a small island. 

If you’re lucky, invisible bruises fade into the glint behind your eyes. 

As I try to look at your eyes as often as I breathe, I’ve noticed them growing bluer and brighter by the day.

Our own bruises, now shared between us in the corridor that connects our hearts, will be passed along. 

That’s the truth of this sisterhood of lovers. 

We don't remember each other so much as we feel each other, long past and not yet born, lying underneath each other’s skin, reminding us of what was, what is, what should’ve been. 

Their words and anguish, fights and fury, soft touches and hard losses are not known to me; their hidden lives are not known to me. But they are mine to hold close. They are ours to add to. 

All of these thoughts of past loves and future souls are put to rest when you wake up, long hair even blonder from the sun. All comes second to ‘you and me, right now,’ the phrase you use to summon me back from the fear I live in when I think too much. 

In the distance, two little girls roll down a grassy hill, their clothes stained green and their hair matted with the gift of childhood indifference. 

Their laughter is drowned out by the sounds of the park, but I know by their eyes that it exists.