I am feeling
Onward and multi directional
I am realizing I am pain
That sits with the Circle
And unlearns Mother’s teachings

mischief?
No goblins now
just orcs with jobs to do
and slit-finding knife tang words
in our Grandfathers’ backs

my future?
In friends’ hands
Like she did mine make
the lovers’ hearts
snap and vanish

Am love?
only if
the One
could be
me

There is at least one boy who prayed that his wedding would be misunderstandings interrupted by obsessions but instead found every moment with her as certain as the river stones and sea glass she polished from his bones with appreciation alone.

There is at least one man who stares at the cornflower mountains overlapping infinite and whistling, with palms on the head of a dog, smelling the coffee sharp and campfire breathing calmly deep over the red knuckled blind fire in his chest.

There are at least two people falling in love through prison breezeblocks, describing their favorite meals with empty bodies, and talking about the beauty of adolescent summers or what color their eyes are, but then, suddenly dying together with great clarity, as the times they should have and could have but didn’t, die with them.

There is at least one woman architecting the elimination of one million people she has never kissed and it luckily guts her how easily the numbers change and remind her of dancing in the coral reef wave she daydreams existed in Polaroids of her mother.

There is at least one girl who wishes her fatal car accident was a musical where the firemen would cradle the back of her neck and croon in harmony, “It’s over now, you can stop triple-checking if he still wants you. You don’t have to ever again feel like being out of control of everything is better medicine than controlling yourself.”