Alice Smith

“I wake reaching for you,
fingers curling around nothing,
closing on air thick with absence.
You are not here, but my body does not believe it.
It still flinches at the shape of you,
at the memory of weight no longer there.
Somewhere beneath my skin,
you still exist.”
― Mason Carter, Saltwater & Smoke: Poems of Almosts, Goodbyes, and What We Leave Behind

“You were a language I learned by ear,
syllables pressed into the curve of my neck,
intonations traced along my spine.
But love, I have forgotten how to conjugate us—
the past imperfect, the future conditional,
sentences unraveling into tenses
that no longer hold.”
― Mason Carter, Saltwater & Smoke: Poems of Almosts, Goodbyes, and What We Leave Behind

“It should weigh nothing.
Just wood and air,
a shape meant for sitting,
a space meant for filling.
But somehow, it carries more than I do.
This chair—
your chair—
still leans slightly to the left,
still remembers the way you sat,
one leg tucked under,
hands resting lightly on the arms,
as if you were always about to leave
but never quite did.”
― Mason Carter, Saltwater & Smoke: Poems of Almosts, Goodbyes, and What We Leave Behind

“Oh, Perseus—your glory shall wither and fall,
In the shadow of serpents, you’ll hear my call.
Your victory is hollow, your name is a lie—
For I am the storm, and I shall never die.”
― Mason Carter, Gothic Poems to Love & Liberty: A Collection of Poems on Myths & Broken Hearts