CW: war, death

Each night, I try to condense my life into a web. 

I start with the basics: I’ve always been blue. I 

am getting older. The trees gave me my name. 

From there, I move onward: in my hometown, 

no one dies, and no one makes it out alive. We 

call our grandparents by their first names. There is 

so much history to cover here: how all of us 

went hunting in packs, caught this flighty thing

called mortality by its lapel. We raged war. How 

so many bombs went off every six minutes. Stasis. 

Shuttered movement. I make another web, one 

with all the names I will not know. Peter, the milkboy.

Peter, the girl selling ice-cream. Peter, the dog 

walker. Peter, Peter. I convince myself that there 

is romance in this action: that archaeologists will 

uncover this sport my town has made of itself, 

that they will call this history. Little kids will learn 

from it, and their kids will turn it into a myth. 

Remember that flighty thing called mortality or 

something? they will say. Let’s hunt. I make one 

last web, one for all the in-betweens that should 

have been enough, for the glue traps the days 

make of themselves. The yarrows are blooming. 

So much dirt still remains for us to build over.

Dhwanee Goyal (she/her) is a sixteen-year-old student from Maharashtra, India. An editor-in-chief of Indigo Literary Journal, her work appears or is forthcoming in Variant Literature, Heavy Feather Review, The Shore Poetry, and more. Her Twitter handle is @pparallell, and her micro-chapbook, ‘Kasauli Daydreams,’ is out from Ghost City Press. She is an Adroit 2021 mentee, and an alumna of Iowa Young Writers’ Studio.