I am a child without a home
I write myself into circles
Push my knees into my chest
Wrap myself in my own arms
No one else will do it for me
I live under an endless gray-slate sky that somehow finds a way to be beautiful
I often forget what summer looks like
But the chemicals stick to my bones like car paint
And I hate the sound of fluorescent lighting
Because I was born sterile in an empty lot
It still hurts to look at the pile of scrap metal
On Wednesday nights when the sky is black
And I run through empty parking lots with bare arms
I run my tongue on the roof of my mouth
Spinning salty lies into threads and tying them across the murky ice that sits in sidewalk cracks until March
I fall asleep to the chorus of train tracks
I'm not even sure they're real

When I was small I used to reach red hands to the sky
And I'd wonder what it would feel like if my palms could touch
I used to leap off creaky silver after my hands scratched its ridges
And I'd pretend like I could fly
Like nothing ever mattered but the scraped knees
I miss those nights when I was breathless and numb
Sliding down raw streets on my stomach, when the laughs escaped my lips without a sound
And I collapsed beneath the white waves, I remember what it looked like
When my ribs folded themselves into hands around my lungs
The deafening roar of silence and the violent passing of time

I love the taste of red wax pouring down flickering fingertips
Cradling ash wood that they used to spell my name
I steal hearts out of mason jars and ask which one was mine
Those days when a laugh wavers on every exhale
And I fall to the ground in fits of dizziness because it's so funny that they all look the same

I've never liked hospitals all that much, but sometimes they feel like home.
But mine was a shell
The reverberations still give me headaches.
And so I write myself into circles to sort out the recalls of illness
Taking frameworks like contraband pills ingested through pencils and flashlights
Because I live under blue tarps and newspapers that never get read
I crave the feeling of falling and the scent of winter mornings
Against the backdrop of a whitewash sky that doesn't exist
Because my hospital was imploded on a Tuesday and now I can't go home.