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someone else woke up in your body, lover, and you never returned.
though your body came back to visit me three months later, ready
to leave the same day and i accidentally lay my head on your shoulder.
the wrong way for a friend. i cooked our meal too long, i accidentally played the song
i wrote for you when you were falling in love. what i mean is, i accidentally played house,
like this could be us if, this could be us when. i let us finish my bottle of vodka.
i said there’s nothing to complicate. you agreed, and after, fell asleep in my bed, where
i accidentally touched you on purpose. where accidentally, you made the soothed sound.
Float
Earth doesn’t hold us anymore, though below are abandoned
tunnels we can stay inside. But that, we do not want, want
is open air, air we suck hard to breathe, breath trains: greedy gasping
gets us high, high enough to wake us. What it was was an exhale
in the earth’s core. After a million year inhale, it let go. By now sponges
have felt four cycles of breath; jellyfish, nautilus, horseshoe crab
three. And how quietly. We evolved on an inhale. We hold on
for the next. It’s so gentle in a world where you float. Usually if we jump
we come back down again. Though we lose insects and birds
to stratosphere. Thin air makes us feel farther from other people.
They’d feel closer in higher gravity. Surely they’d feel closer. This air
doesn’t carry our voices far; begets telepathy. Our children
are silent and know. Throw them in the air is now let them go,
catch them before they drift too high! That object in the sky—
A balloon? A balloon? A balloon?
When April Gray Wilder isn't adoring her cat, she finds some time to write. She is currently in her final year (sob) in the MFA program at Hollins University, in Roanoke, Virginia. She can be reached at hi@aprilgraywilder.com.