The day presses against my stomach, as if
it could demand to be fed and not the other way around.
I reach out a hand and clasp the equator
while you straddle the poles, a starving child waiting for summer.
Don't you know, the seasons have closed their doors, so that yesterday
closed people walked all around me and somehow I was the only one open--
flotsam, jetsam in my hair
everything smelling of wreckage and jasmine.

The dawn of questioning:
Why don't they want girls to turn out like men, anyway?
Why does a poem change when it
touches the air?
When no one answers
it goes back to being evening.

Today is a dragon I was born to fight, I think.
I am so certain that I have dreamed it
though my dreams are plowing through, swallowing my hair
like the throat and hands I've never possessed.

One thing’s for certain: no one knows how deep their breath is
until they write poetry.

Then our mouths slowly get tired and move away
our bodies still solid, like
heavy gray elephants carrying girls around. I watch them plod on,
my heart feeling like it’s been through a washer
and a dryer. It doesn’t come cheap,
doing it in a public facility, you know?

Sooner or later I will
have to start over with something so intangible
it cannot even be called junk
and unjunk is probably
the junkiest thing in the world to junk with.