Lizzy Burnam 🐞

Driving slow down a street you’ve never seen before, 
you remember how every city’s a little bigger 
than it feels in the dry afternoon, all your muscles taut 
with tension carried over from yesterday (and week, and year)
and then the fear creeps in—is it kinder not to know? 
You ask the gray hawk who watches you from a low branch,
his heart open in your direction. Maybe 
forever’s a marketing scheme, but maybe 
forever deserves a chance. Either way, 
you can’t afford to buy what you can’t afford to break. 
You miss the sound of water, swelling as it breathed. 
You miss your mom, who tested 
all your barricades as if war would be inevitable. 
You miss not knowing that war would be inevitable. 
Some days, you wake with a rock in your throat, 
moaning like a dead telephone line, 
the sense you might crawl into the empty air 
after the voicemail message and suffocate there. 
You want to be still and do nothing 
except be held by the person you love. 
But the houseplants need watering, 
and the dishes need to be washed and put away, 
and the shadow that followed you here still dances 
like a night terror, mocking your body’s natural sway.  
Dreamless girl, you are human; you look first 
through your glass eye out of habit, 
just like everybody else. 
But embodied sight is the gift of age. 
And just like everybody else, you’ve got time—
your own invaluable time—to waste.