I want my heart to feel like the great Salt Lakes, reaching towards each other, constantly suspended in the moment just before contact. I want to build this anticipation, but my patience is shorter than your last haircut, when we sat by the river to discuss model trains.

I want my mind to feel like a hummingbird when it finally lands to rest on the red plastic device filled with sugar water outside my mother’s kitchen window, but I’m quite a ways from home now and have been for a while.

I want my stomach to feel like the tree roots, the red oaks, the ones that dwarf me and that I know would let me get my favorite kind of lost in their home, the kind we planned on visiting after graduation, but I am usually stuck in maple sap.

I want my mouth to taste like strawberries, ripened scarlet in the sun, the kind my tall friend’s mother mashes up with sour rhubarb for the perfect jam to last us through winter, but more often than not, my teeth are coffee-stained and my tongue tends to be too sharp for delicate berries.

I want my skin to feel like satin ribbons, the kind that tie little girl sashes before holy events and parties where they dance on their father’s toes for the first time, and find it perfectly marvelous, but I am covered in scratches and marks from building enormities.

I am a patchwork from the most meaningless scraps. I was a junkyard doll with mismatch buttons eyes and melted cardboard shoes. My head is a garbage heap left out too long, my eyes are scooping all of it up, and my dress is made of someone else’s throwaway linen.  My aluminum can hands stretch out for anyone’s how-town while I think of shoestring revues and paper mache.

If today was for giant caterpillars,
giant crowds,
giant sounds,
and chaos, then this evening must be for

Blueberry fingertips
white wine in my glass
the music of an accordion
and a paperback novel.

Breeze in the window that waltzes with ribbons
and fills the bottles I’ve collected for the past six years.

(soft t shirt from the first time I fell asleep on his couch)

mmm, stop WORRYING.
It is no time at all for any of that.
Take the time to take the time to take your time.
shhh, brain.
hush, mouth.
Quiet Quiet Quiet

lightning bugs always know where to find me.

I mean this literally. I mean they consistently land on my fingertips when I’m gesturing, I mean, they rest on my shoulders when I’m dancing, I mean they find my knees when I’m wandering.


I’m perpetual motion.

They flit onto my skirt from my parents field in the forest, dozens of ecstatic chromatic insects, missing my tonsils this time and tickling the back of my neck.

And I’m clothed in phosphorescent resplendent incandescent light.

you are splatter-painting in my living room
bright red like blood,
like the light in the room from that day you took me away
framed in the center.
"Oh."
we chase and try to catch the moon, but it isn’t out tonight, so

we hold each other instead.
I use my garden as a tightrope and you challenge me like a ringmaster.
I’m in a spangled leotard, turning for you, charming under the ink sky, and you go inside to make me some smores.


You said you couldn’t stay over because you had work in the morning, but I woke up to your elbows and my coffee.

hazelnut coffee cup
cotton button down
hem my skirt
hem my thoughts about your hands
your belt left bruises
your teeth leave marks
your eyes leave me without

It’s a bit like climbing up the stairs to the very top of the tallest building in your neighborhood. You do it alone, completely alone, after working at some cafe a mile from your house. You count out your tips, put on your headphones, and slip into your own world as the humans, the families, the students, all become some sort of impromptu choreography. They are all silhouettes and so are you.
You take the long way home because you are tired and you don’t feel like crossing the bridge alone and hopping the fence. The tall building taunts you, leering. You meant to climb to the top with someone else, with anyone else, but today you are alone.
It’s thirty six floors. It’s the second-largest-something-or-other’s-wayward-dedication-to-knowled­ge, but regardless of the history, it’s made of stone and it’s enormous, so obviously, you must climb it. You are alone.
You walk inside. You do not belong there, and the maintenance man looks at you strangely, but you realized a long time ago that being slight of stature and pretty and female lets you get away with a lot more than you should, and besides, you are a silhouette now anyway.
Climb the stairs. It takes an hour or so. Each step feels the same. Look around, tie your hair up. It’s getting so so so long, you’ve taken to braiding it most days. Think about kissing boys. Think about ******* boys. Think about the time you kicked a boy’s heart in the teeth as a casualty of running away from everything else. Climb faster. Think of anything else. Think of loneliness. Think of sandwiches, think of dancing, think of Greek poetry. Take a rest. Climb. Think. Climb. Climb.

The top is three glass windows and two offices and one library. Sit on the windowsill and think of how small your hands are. Tie your hair up again. Headphones off. It is your nature to want too much, so by the time you get to the top, you wonder about the roof.

The old man living next door to my rented shoebox

told me that the hospitals are slowly draining the humanity from the city

and that the country is just animality rationality fictionality

and that at least when there was a king, everyone had food.

now his wife can’t pick things up because her hands hurt

so she throws things

constantly

and at least in India, he knew where he stood.

"My granddaughter on the fifth of July will be coming into her ninth year of life. She wants the world, though."