Lizzy Burnam 🐞

Sometimes I think so hard about things of no consequence:
How your head don't keep you warm
How long Amelia must've been on that island agonizing over the damned jar of freckle cream
How women build homes while men build interstate highways 
How the human heart is the same size as a fist is the same size as an apple
Anne and her Nana-Hex and Mary with her dogs
The flushed faces of war-born babies and the sweat in their mothers' hair  
In through the screen, out through the screen 
A different kind of breath
When the lungs fail and the cheeks sink in like rotten jack-o-laterns
How some of that pain just don't belong to you, no matter
How late you let the coals bleed heat into your wailing mouth
How making love is just one kind of prayer 
And these knock-kneed nonsense letters are another
Other, always
Even with your skeleton hands braided together in the lava-rock tombstone
How the lava-rock lives like ice in the other direction 
The cemeteries swept with smoke and the phantom freed by water
The open air broken by a cheerily, cheer up, cheer up, cheerily 
How far a mile stretches without a map 
How loose the bottle cap in the days following the popped-off buttons and the gash in her pillowcase
How the top result for the Google search "sage" is for accounting software and not the fucking plant
These things of no consequence 
I roll them up like sushi in a soft bed of solitude 
And I keep them under my tongue
And they never melt down 
And I never spit them out 
And I think if I tried to chew them up and swallow 
They would bloat like wet bread and get lodged in my throat
And my face would overflow like a clogged toilet 
A long slow spin and a steady gurgle 
And they'd squelch through my clenched teeth onto the floor
And no scrub and no spritz and no soak
And no squeegee could ever rinse the rancid smell away