Your Brain: A Landscape
An Escher painting, a bathtub
with glitter up all sides, biodegradable
plastic. The shimmer of light
off water fountains. Melting clocks, time
itself, the age when you could backbend
with only a little strain.
Eight crochet stitches
and their encoded abbreviations, cartoons
made for adults, both a black hole
and a white one. A well of grief
with no bucket.
Several punctuation marks
but mostly questions, the perpetual
semicolon. Typewriter font
and printer jams, tightropes and
jump ropes and ropes made from spiderwebs.
All the places
you have never been. Dormant volcanoes,
every apocalypse, clematis
and sunflowers in heirloom varieties.
Beach body and no body and what if
you were a body. Tomorrow and today
and what you pretend
of yesterday. Star sparkles
and day-old baked goods in the egg aisle,
the absence of wrinkled faces.
Mothers who are their own daughters,
loop-de-loops without gravity, bubblegum
so thick it barely fits in your mouth.
Scraped knees and spontaneous learning,
small hands pouring milk
into cereal for the first time. Sunbursts
of pride and alphabetized mailslots, glass slippers
and underripe white nectarines.
A broken wedding ring, a Care Bear
baby blanket, floating candles,
tarot cards turned paper-cut knives.
Frills and folds, drums and drumsticks,
forever and the nanoseconds
comprising a single breath.