As part of the 2021 Momentum Festival, BIMA is once again partnering with our friends at Hiatus Magazine, an online compilation of quarantined teenagers’ most creative works. Throughout the two-week festival, we will be featuring pieces from Hiatus’ three issues that highlight our natural world, including written works featured here on BIMA’s blog and visual work featured as a #DailyMomentOfBeauty on our Instagram and Facebook feeds.

Be sure to visit Hiatus Magazine’s website to explore their most recent issue, Beginnings: Winter 2021.

Now on to today’s featured work!

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Named for a Flower by Aster Isaacson

She was named for a flower.
And like a flower her time in my life was temporary.
The time we spent together meant almost nothing,
not in the wide lens that sums up a lifetime.

But with all beautiful things, temporary things,
there are moments that come back to me late at night,
or when I’m reading someone else’s words
yet all that my mind can do is put together my own.

She took my hand and placed it on her heart.
The cold night air made the tips of her fingers like ice,
but mine were warm and we just stood there.
Her heart was pounding but she breathed deep
and seemed to slow it almost at will.
Slowed so quickly she seemed almost not human.
In that moment when her heart had slowed
mine had done the opposite but

I could not slow it.
And I did not want to.

And it didn’t matter because she couldn’t feel it
Because she was named for a flower
And like a flower was unaware of her surroundings
Apart from light and dark, summer and fall

So my beating heart remained untouched by her cold fingers
But they laced in mine and pulled me along,
Crammed in cars and shivering in the rain
They drew lines on my face and took selfies on my phone

Sometimes I think they could have frozen my heart
If I’d let them, if I’d wanted them to
But less than sixty beats per minute isn’t really my style
And girls named for flowers
Don’t have that much power over me
Except the ones that do,
but thing is that I’m not named for a flower
And my heart is not cold because

I do not show it
And I do not want to

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Be sure to follow Hiatus Magazine at their Instagram and check out all the work on their website here.