Callista Pitman

daylight savings time

i. 6pm first day after the clocks changed and the sky is dark as a velvet dance dress. clouds
arch in the shape of a ribcage, a body stripped of its summer skins. falling to twigs the way
the maples have dropped leaves brown round their roots and hum empty limbs stretching to
the stars. I slide my hair behind my ears and bare the slope of my chin to the sky. the world
is bare and cold in november, the hollow hills we make of ourselves

ii. I feel like a chasm in a hoodie, something unanswered and echoing when I glance into
my own face refracted against the cracked drugstore windows. the moon runs mothering fingers
through my hair as I climb the shivering plum tree in the snowy winter’s birth. how quickly we
learn to define ourselves by things that fall apart in our fingers

ii. the way the clouds make a body out of the sky until the ribcage melts into moonlight and
we are once again here

                                        floating in the abyss

                                                                         unknowable canyons.

Callista Pitman spends most of her time walking through the suburbs, lying on forest floors, and crying to podcasts. She is head editor at Ripple Lit, and her debut chapbook Starmilk Teeth was released 2022 with ZED Press. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies and contests by Vocamus Press, and the Eden Mills Writers Festival teen poetry competition 2022. Callista Pitman grew up in Guelph, Ontario, and currently studies at McGill University.