Paperweight Poetry

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 di

I would like to be orange and blue at the same time, I would like to cut a crown out of paper and place it on my head, I would like to tell the toothless girl with a falling out french braid  and a dinner fork plunged through her hand that I love her,  that it was okay to count the splotches of blood on the linoleum, if it was her only solace from the world.   I want to make my bed with children’s sleuth books,   and pretend i have dragons protecting me in my fists, I want to tell the toothless girl with falling out pigtails  and a pool stick plunged through her chest that I love her, that it was okay to count the carpet fibers as friends, if it was her only solace from the world. I want to wrap her up in the purple of my heart, open the window wider so she can hear the song of the water, rearrange the commas of her childhood, give back things she never knew she lost to the skeleton of her youth, call out to her from the other room  to show her

I stand in the door wanting nothing, but to be a part of the little house we built of medium-rare earth and broken eggshells and wriggly worms, the bedroom walls are green and there is a single thought tactfully pinned to its center. I remember that everything is quieter in green, and to find solace in the silent ecstasy of the earth’s preeminent color, to excavate and toss away all the colors until we reach the obvious, that green is the walls, and green is earth, and earth reclaims buildings slowly over time with moss then ivy, then as the buildings dilapidate and become their own graves in gardens of decay, it swallows them whole, like swamps and quicksand I thought would play a much larger role in my girlhood battles than they did. I want to crawl inside of the little house we built and play in the dirt with the worms, I want to be reclaimed by terra cotta clay and tunnels made by ants, and if I need to, I’ll send a note to the green,