Ivy Segal; “Stardust,” “Lavender Honey,” and “On the Edge of my World”

Artist Feature: Ivy Segal / Poetry / Class of 2023

By Sonja Cutts

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Stardust

The Big Bang was when we were all really born, wasn’t it?

And maybe I crave being up there,

Because the quiet winking of the stars

Is like a heartbeat in the womb.

The one place where I belong.

We live on a pencil dot in eternity,

Us, glistening with tears

Running numbers and making spacecraft.

We’re made of space, we’re always expanding, infinitely blooming

Because gravity is slowly crushing our lungs

And humanity is the night sky,

Peppered with neutron, red giant, T tauri

stars,

Individually just burning balls of light,

But together, pouring wonder into my body, gallons of it

Every time I glance upwards

Friendships. constellations.

We live at the speed of light

And shiver when doubt

clouds our eyesight.

Stuck frozen in ice,

Until even the warm stick of our blood stops.

I have planets in my head

I came from up there! I scream, pointing,

writhing in my seat

at a planetarium

as I try to touch the false galaxies, full of lies -

I’m trapped here in a body.

I see the nebulae in your eyes, you know?

Shining in your dilapidated pupils,

Sprinkled with dying stars

You can’t breathe, not really, unless your lungs are made of dark matter

I see the sound waves as you sigh

Watch electrons shifting as you move

Constellations marking the structure of your face, a nose, the curve of your lips,

And I count on my fingers, fascinated by your individual swarm of atoms

So different, yet each particle is distinctly

you.

I am everything that happened when everything turned red and bloomed into existence

We all are, everything is,

And if I ever crawled my way up there, to where I was born,

I would throw myself out. Away from heartbeats and voices and

The whirring of metal and atoms splitting

So that,

Even for a moment, before I turned to porcelain

And my shell shattered away,

I could take a short breath of

Stardust.

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Lavender Honey

It rained so much that the desert held me.

It breathed sweet promises onto my cheek

and smelt like breeze and quiet guitar

I swallowed the tenderness of that embrace,

However fleeting,

Before it fell away like ash,

Shifting through the spaces between my fingers,

And there I was.

The quiet was the most startling, like ice water,

Or maybe the inescapable visibility of the horizon,

Or the warmth coming from both the ground and the sky

My lungs filling and emptying with the slow rise and fall of the earth.

Skin baking in the light

A half buried house in the sand,

I feel from the moment I’m in its shadow

It is not like me, with my birthdays and mortality and counting-down blinks.

It is, was, and will be.

The cosmos are now dizzying in their clarity

The moon is so much brighter

When the ground is all the same.

Maybe the stars are causing the dots on my shoulders and cheeks,

An urging from my mind to my body to mimic what it sees.

I am the place where the ground and the sky meet.

Warm water

and rice

and dates and

I think I’ve forgotten what a clock sounds like,

Only knowing the heat under my toes

and the hue of the sky.

Long days laying still,

Listening to the sun.

So massive and terrifying

Yet so mild as it bathes me,

Falling soft for miles, I catch it on my skin

Before it can hit the ground.

And so I dance to the rhythm of my shadow,

To the poetic irony in the absence of light.

The desert fills in my cracks,

Thinking becomes optional.

It’s lazy and my breath drips like lavender honey.

It soothes my soul to the point that

I become it.

And only then,

When I understood the harmony in the contradiction,

When I could see the deep promise and utter hopelessness in a blank sky,

The loveliness in emptiness,

The way I lived, so compliant, in a time loop of a day,

The quiet, almost bashful starvation, the need for something other,

Did I understand what the earth feels

When it rains.

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On the Edge of My World

I am at the door,

And the final step is

Reaching into my black hole of a pocket and finding the key.

The ledge I am balanced on, one foot in front of the other, is thinner than my pinky finger.

My legs are shaking. It is not sustainable.

I cannot pull myself up the stairs of therapy and breakdowns and looking deep, deep into myself

And stay here at 90 percent.

The wind is stronger here, higher up, where I can see how far I fell.

I was twelve when I decided I wasn’t good enough

And the air was sucked out of the room, carrying me with it.

falling in slow motion back and down, everything unfamiliar, overwhelming,

Me in my confusion not knowing what it was and how to stop it,

And I hit the ground like a bag of sand.

Every bone in my body screamed at me, but, in thinspo on Pinterest and workouts on youtube,

I found my anesthetic.

Diet ice cream

BMI calculators

Lies

Painful dreams of a thigh gap

A cloud around me, smothering me in numb bliss.

Now I am fifteen.

I look better, I eat better,

But I still feel the words I am not enough

In the app school uses for grades

In my lungs when I eat a donut

Hidden underneath my hoodie.

My ball and chain.

But I am here. I am so close, closer than my mom in our embrace

I hear it in my parents’ voices,

And I feel it now, my hand still searching blindly for the key, for I love myself,

I am standing here, swaying, on the edge of my world.

There is nothing more, whispers the skeleton in the back of my brain.

The world is not larger. There is only me.

I know my body is powerful.

My hands weave stars while my feet play drums with the earth’s core.

My breath is the heartbeat between thunder and lightning,

My heart an earthquake, my smile the last moments of sunset.

My body is not something to wish was smaller, weaker, less itself.

I see these words and I reach for them but my hands pass through.

I can’t feel them, can’t soak them in, stuck on this side.

This is a line I cannot straddle.

I cannot split myself between

I LOVE MYSELF

And

I AM NOT ENOUGH.

Either way, I am going to be left raw,

Shocked,

A large part missing.

My fingers begin to fall apart as I reach deep inside my pocket, deep inside my heart, for the

key,

and outside of my head I look in the mirror and stare at myself and say out loud

Is it worth it?

When everyone is telling me it is and everything is telling me it isn’t?

For birthdays without calories?

For college?

For finally, finally, shrugging off the weight that dissolved in my blood when I was twelve, and

breathing deep. Breathing in the universe.

For getting back the pieces of myself I put in the toilet, scraped the food in, and flushed.

Because it will kick and scream and try to drag me back, pull on my arms until it hurts, as I step

through.

And it means shattering

The protective shell of numbers and push-ups and quiet self-loathing.

It means fixing my broken parts without the numb.

Gravity pulls us down, I know, not up,

And this door is only locked from one side.

Is it worth it

Asks everyone I know at once. I see the words on my own lips in the mirror and against the

skeleton’s scream I bend my legs to reach further. My fingers touch cold metal.

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Ivy Segal is a writer and a junior at St. Mary’s Academy. Though she primarily writes prose, Segal has been in love with poetry since the age of four, when she wrote her very first poem. Speaking to Escribe Maria, Segal explained that she’s inspired to write a poem whenever an idea strikes her that she feels needs to be put down on paper. “It can be something as small as seeing a photo or listening to a song that gives me a very specific feeling I try to encapsulate, or reflecting on my life and years of struggle,” she said. “I am very much inspired by the idea that the words I write can help translate an idea or feeling from my head into someone else’s, as well as the knowledge that everyone will interpret my words differently and react in a slightly different way.”

Once struck with an idea, Segal says she hurries to get it down as quickly as possible. “My creative process is really not complicated,” she explained. “I get an idea and scramble to get it in writing as fast as I can.”

Her poem “Lavender Honey” was awarded with a Silver Key by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, while “On the Edge of My World” was given an Honorable Mention.

Photo by Ivy Segal