kids cut through the middlewhen you spend a summer somewhere
where people squirrel away their
ugly children, it's hard not to notice
the subtle strain of the truth
on certain smarter faces,
or the absolute oblivion
in certain spinning eyes
and stumbling legs.
--
i met a girl named K,
just K,
with ankles like a deer and a voice
loud like noise and swampy like a swamp.
she liked orange foods and big words and
her hands shook like the girls in jazz class.
K clicked her tongue between words sometimes
but nobody ever mentioned it. her socks
were alphabetized. she carried a comb in her back pocket
but only 'cause she needed it, she said.
her hair was turning to snow and falling out,
she said. 'cause she pulled at it too much, she said.
she said other things, too, but i promised
never to write them. i promised not to tell
the bad things she'd done, the boy who kept her in, in, in.
she made bracelets of awful words at night and kept them
under her bed. she did it maybe so that even worse things wouldn't go bad.
sometime
read this when you're so angry you shakelittle drops of oil make rainbows on wet concrete
and i don’t know how beautiful you find that,
but sometimes you gotta learn that
the littlest things are the prettiest,
like the shape of your fingernails and the crinkles
you get at the corner of your eyes when you laugh and
when you grow old and i know i said “grow old”
like it’s a temporary thing, but that’s because it is.
you can think it’s forever but it’s really
a split second because you don’t matter, not when
the universe is still growing and speeding through a nothingness
we can’t even fathom, not when color doesn’t exist in space
but nebulas still explode in shades of gold and green,
not when there are stars who die
before their light ever touches our faces. you don’t matter,
not to anyone but the people who have fallen in love
with the way you walk and the way you breathe
and the way you keep doing both.
i don’t care that the universe is spinning and grow
glass bones and paper skinShe had always been a smidgen short
of something whole and he was never
broken to begin with.
Except sometimes they sort of were
entirely, irreparably, miserably, broken.
Where are you going?
Where are you going, where I can't follow?
And that, she finds for all of her brilliance and prodigal logic,
is something she couldn't answer.
It sort of scares her, a little,
when she thinks about it at night.
Especially when there's no one to see her,
and the only thing that touches her
is the inky darkness of her room.
Other things scare her too.
The thought of her name sprawled across a grave,
broken beyond repair. Yet, he is her line to humanity;
His smiles are her air.
He is all essence.
Yet, he bothers her in a way she didn't know
she could be bothered. They were oil and water;
open but couldn't fit.
She wonders if that's how he felt about it.
He still is everything, prodding at her mind.
He will always be everything.
Because he reminds her.
He reminds her of who she was before she was