The strangest thing about it was how strange they all made it seem.

They were long and white, her claws. Strong like whale bones, fragile like a spider’s silk. Each one ended in a razor point, ten knives where fingers should be, they said. The girl was practised with her claws. She could shake a hand without drawing blood, hug a friend without ripping flesh. The claws were almost strangely inconspicuous.

Nothing will be right until we eat poems like paper peaches
Falling backwards into 
Grocery carts and empty souls
Double dipped in the Atlantic
It’s frantic how we
Grab inky onions and expect them to end our existential crises 
While they simply soak in the blood of our language
(Peel the skins off and it will drip from the core
Divining your truth on the cutting board)
Juice sinks into teeth
And we seethe when it stains us, how we breathe
But we grew this fruit, so
We will buy it or bury it in the earth where it was born
And I wonder will we be torn from the ties of our tethering, teetering terra
And move on to a burning celestial Sahara.
I am written in the small white flowers that dance across the banks of the highways
Hopping, halting, harrowing.
I want to dip my fingers in sunset sky
I want skeletal wings, and to make them fly.

 

I am hungry, so hum me melodies
Sing me seashells and 
Write me in as a rebel.
I am hungry, so feed me infinities
Author autumns and
Ink in cottonwood trees.
Goodness knows we don’t have enough
Oxygen to breathe.
Genie lamps
Wasted stamps
And a bottled blue moon
River running
Spirit coming
Coming soon
Coming soon.
I am starving, so bring me to starlings
Make me moonbeams
Before the sun leaves
Moth wings haunt me so don’t let light taunt me
Let me run and
Level jump and
Cartwheel above the earth without turning upside down
Let warmth wipe away my frown.
Piano hands
Come to dance
In a sunset-gold sky.
Pirouetting 
Treasure betting
I will win
I will fly.

I don’t know what to say.
Rest In Peace sounds so hollow being typed on my phone’s keyboard.
You’ll never know how we mourned you
Now that you’re
Gone.
You’ll never know how it all ended;
What happens to the world now that you’re
Gone?
I wrote your life down on a piece of paper last spring
And it still slipped away.
Somehow I thought you’d still be there the day I died,
Putting on your lace collars
And dissenting.
I’m not qualified to sing your praises,
But thank you for everything you ever did.
Thank you for doing something that made us cry now that you're
Gone.
I hope maybe
You caught a glimpse of what we would do
Without you
Somehow, some way,
But the truth is
You made me realize
Just as you were leaving
How little time we have
To stay.
I don’t know what to say.
I should have thanked you while you were still here
To listen.

 

Maybe your mind feels like a tangle of worries,
but there’s a web of invisible hands holding you up.
Maybe your body is a little bit broken,
but we are all putting ourselves back together behind closed doors.

You are not alone.
Let that be your mantra when the voices in your head are screaming too loud.
You are not alone.
Whisper it to yourself when there’s no one else to whisper for you.
You are not alone.
Someone else is going through what you are going through
and we are all putting ourselves back together
a little bit at a time.
It’s okay to cry.
It’s okay to be mad.
Let this be your mantra when the tears won’t stop rolling.
It’s okay.
It’s okay.
Maybe it’s not okay.
That’s okay.
You are strong.
You are all you need
to get through this,
to get better,
to get there.
But that wall of invisible hands
is holding you,
holding you,

Many people ride on trains. They have become so popular that we wrapped metal ropes around the earth to let them roam across it. Generations have made their living building these ropes; binding our planet so we can get from one place to another without breaking a sweat. Some trains send exhaust spiraling into the air, a dancing smoke signal siren who calls you back to Old England, and times before we worried a little more with every mile we chugged, or drove, or sailed. Some trains hum to the music of electromagnets pushing you forward, into a future of white metal and sleek cities. Some trains tunnel through dark, graffitied, underground hallways, sifting hundreds of people around a city through a claustrophobic tube. Many people ride on trains.

Twin bug bites stain my legs
The spring breeze plays with loose pieces of my hair
And my soul
I don’t know if I like the taste of this tangy lollipop better
Or the the way the orange contrasts against the blue of my tank top
I have to take it out of my mouth to admire this every few minutes
And to relieve my taste buds of its sweet tang.
I'm proud of the way a scrunchy holds my hair almost in place
A little smoother than it used to be.
I let my legs revel in the feel of the air rushing past them
Because they haven’t felt it in months
The sun shines brighter than it did from inside
Trying to solve the mysteries of tangents and parabolas
I love the people I share the sun with
And all I can feel is joy.