Finding another poet who seems
to write your own heart is like
coming into a familiar garden
when the light is just right

when you are eight you will start to become sick of waking
up early to go to church but your mother will drag you
with her anyway and she will always spend too much time on
her makeup so you will both end up being late and the
sweet sickly scent of the perfume she sprays on makes
you sneeze and Sundays will very quickly become
the worst days of the week, this will be when you start
to be ridiculed by all the other girls for having short hair
and this will be when your father starts coming home late
enough for your mother to be suspicious and for the
sound of Frank Sinatra's greatest hits to stop being loud
enough to mask her cries as he hits her for being too **** curious.
Sundays will be when you learn that the devil is an infinite
amount of liars starting with your mother when she says
she is fine and ending with your father when he says
he loves you. now when you are bored you will start to
hide in your closet and pretend to be someone else.
your closet now becomes Narnia, it becomes the rabbit hole Alice falls
into, it becomes Neverland and it becomes the safe haven
your mother's jazz records no longer offer; when you are eight you
will feel the weight of the world stretched out onto your all too
little shoulders, compressed into your mind and a monster in it's
own right that is scarier than the one under your bed because you
cannot find a way to escape it, it lives and breathes inside of you and
it forms a pit in the core of your stomach whenever you see
your mother flinch as your father kisses her softly and later you will
find out that this feeling is called fury but for now it remains
****** into the walls of your mind like a bookshelf at a library
and it surges rapidly like a tsunami and leaves nothing but debris in
it's wake, when you are eight you will begin to dig holes in your
skin with your fingernails to release the pain and the frustration
you feel that causes wreckage inside of you and later on you will
learn to describe this as being cataclysmic but for now you are eight
and you wear your hair in pigtails even though it's much too
short and catch fireflies with mickey mouse in your mind as you
hear frank sinatra's greatest hits become increasingly louder

(h.l.)