twenty-four.

And
life is
better because
bandages are made
in the shape of crayons.

Remember being small, that summer
you fell out of the tree beyond the
clothesline. Blood welling up
along your arm building and
building until it tipped
down to drip from your
fingers and thunk
into the
dirt.

The sharp shock
of it, the stain that
never quite washed out of your
shoe.
      The pale fracture of the scar under
your fingers as you waited months later for the
second-grade school bus.

                          Such a thing, even
now, would be easier to bear if stamped
with CRAYON and colored green,
echoing with the colors that
swirled together the next
winter, melted down
the classroom
radiator
to drip in puddles
along the linoleum cracks,

                           the warm scent
of candles like a midnight vigil memory
overwhelming the sun as it watered
over the cracked sidewalk
and grimed
snow.

twenty-three.

I have forgotten the words
that I wrote this morning. I stitched
them together while
walking, using the
broken blister on
my heel as an anchor. The pieces
of sentences slid into
each other like a hymn, like
fireworks. The phrases I've
forgotten
sang quietly of
promises, and the clean good
green smell of birch leaves and
poison sumac, and the
way the sun hissed in my
ears and buzzed along
my fingers. They were the words I
wanted to offer today, and
if only I'd written them down. If
only I'd pushed them out into the world.
If only.

twenty-two.

I ask, "does that make sense?" and
her blank look
belies the faltering,
"yes, maybe." She means to say,
"no, not even a little,
this question is an inland sea
and I'm sitting
cross-legged on the shore
with a teacup,
holding all the
bits I can comprehend in my hands
and considering drowning
myself in the rest."

twenty-one.

I envy people who title a poem
"POEM". How are they so certain? What
secret surety floats between the margins,
allows them to believe that
this poem, it is a poem deserving
of no description but its existence,
a poem that will never become,
that other poem by that poet, the poem with no
title, you know the one, with
(the unicorns, the explosions, the nights
that we sat by the radio and waited
for fireflies to guide us away), no name.

twenty.

In the middle of the floor
skitters a beetle. Black, trapped
by the click of the light. I

hesitate in the doorway, close
to caught myself, unwilling
to advance, unable to retreat.

nineteen.

To wish for the weather to break
is to hope for more rain, miserable
damp sticky lightning and thunder.
It is to release the awkward desire for
sullen puddles and
wrinkled fingers, shoes that squish
and cotton colors run together
into a muddle of
Still. When the sun beats down

and the breeze shimmers with
discomfort and the burn of sweat in
mosquito bites jabs like all my
past bad decisions, that seems
a small price to pay.

That new misery seems a fair exchange on
sunburns and wrinkle-squinting
heat haze nightmares.

eighteen.

In 1861, October, Karl Marx took the
British papers to task. Their
reporting on the Rebellion in America was
shoddy, he claimed, internally inconsistent, and
missed the point almost entirely.

Marx would be that guy,
the one in the front of the class, taking
notes. He'd understand what
was going on, but whenever he explained
eyes would glaze over. He'd raise his

hand, and wonder quietly why no one
ever invited him out for coffee
after, why the mutters and shuffling of paper
followed each brave and (frankly)
reasonable request that the world realign itself.