Write about your world

The title is spoken by my advisor.


“Write about your world”

Breathe in experience : breathe out poetry
—Muriel Rukeyser


How can I see the world if I have to keep my head down? It's easier to watch the ground, count cracks in the sidewalk as I cautiously step over them.

It's cold. Let me drink coffee and feel it sledding down my throat. Let me forget the sludge stuck to the underbelly of my car, staring at me as I kick it from the car's frame.

At night a tree cracks outside my window while I lay in bed. I think about the papers lining my walls—poems and cousins of poems and half-sisters of poems. Out my window

I see a face in the trees, but it is just my backyard, a stump of a neighbor's fir or an overflowing trash can.

If I did write about the world I'd talk about the moon and how much I miss her in the daytime.

When I exhale, the pages taped to the wall above me shudder. The covers are stale with sweat and shed dermis, and the dust mites feed on them.

The dresser sits missing a leg. It's holding clothes I haven't worn since I was twelve. I keep them because I worry about the space they'll leave

when they're gone. Is this my world? Feet pad in the hallway, water runs into a glass. A hacking cough rattles in the kitchen, a cracked, warped bell.

So many years looking at the ground and my neck is permanently curved. I can look up when lying on my bed, see the ceiling.

A child lived here once. Parents painted glitter on the ceiling, glinting. I am afraid someone will break my body open like a piñata, and I, like confetti-candy, will fall free.