Time present time

I stand on my toes, on a box, on top of a wheeled chair

to reach the clock high above me,

so that I can cut the whiskers of it off with

a pair of gardening scissors.

But I hear a knock at the door and it is present

standing in the way holding a fish,

she hands it to me, so I ask her what to do with it,

she tells me she knows that everything the birds say

really matters to me

that she knows that I count and store every breath that the trees release,

in an empty peanut butter jar under my bed,

but that I could not remember my first cold water,

there was no recollection of my first bright moon.

She tells me to hold the fish

and decide what it means to me in terms of love,

so that I will remember when I leave this room,

and when I go to sleep,

that I once loved something new, and small, and grey,

and something that had scales and looked nothing like me,

and I didn’t know where it came from or where it would go from there,

but that that didn’t matter.

I gave the fish some breaths from the peanut butter jar under my bed,

and I laid my hand on its beating chest,

I told it I would carry it in only the best rivers inside of me,

then I walked the fish home, thinking about how

twenty years is such a small age to grow.

-anna sluder