The Human Eye Can Register More Versions of Green Than Any Other Color
The children used their best cursive to graffiti viridian,
mantis, and laurel across the porta-potty.
On the fire road, some plants grow without chlorophyl.
The sun doesn’t need to be in all bodies,
they shoot up anyway. Every spring under the bridge
river stones rise and recede over the shape
of my first boyfriend, yarrow and poppies growing in the toxicity
of the soft serpentine soil.
On Monday, we asked the children to lay down beneath the windows
of the classroom, the announcement This is not a drill
opening and closing like a sour meat bloom while we listened like dogs
to the swat team breathing on the other side of the door.
On Tuesday, a girl told me that she kept a knife to keep
from getting got, her hands still
as miniature doves dead at her side. It takes a lot to sink
your blade into a body.
On Sunday morning, gunshots spoke like an ancient God
across the canyon. How can we register
measurements between figures such as the circular sound
of a muzzle blast against the sleeping town
when we know there is a green inside the wound?
It moves without feet, 200 vertebrae in its tail.
Mujina at the Sleepover
It had just started raining when the girl lost her breath,
first as a yelping then as pale blue. I led her
outside, away from the allergen in my home.
The other girls followed,
forming a collective lung,
breathing and breathing. I noticed my desire
to turn away. Beyond
the lights of the ambulance, birds perched in trees.
My intimacies, sleeping on branches. I tried not to
but ended up imagining her parents. I am so sorry
for what is in my home. The oxygen tank was being lifted,
her head tilted back. I kept looking
into the night, perhaps a different adult
lived past the headlights, one who would come
for all the lungs and make them flowers
incapable of closing. I tried not to run away.
Instead I walked. I took the blue girl with me, and the others
followed. I led them from their other selves.
They were draped in pink fur and blankets
embroidered with stars. If we turned our heads back
towards the house we would have seen ourselves there, worried
and watching the paramedics. But we did not turn around.
We walked until we saw the badger. She moved between the fissures
of rock, her flat body dry in the rain.
We followed her into her den. This is not a storybook.
This is not folklore. This is what happened. The earth
was tangled and wormed. The girls became mounds of moss.
We were rootless, and stemless.
We did not need to breathe.
