love, read, write

i talked to someone i love today. (sometimes

i feel like a handful of pebbles at the bottom of a jar full of water. 

perhaps a little boy found an empty pasta jar in the lakehouse cupboard,

left the back door ajar in his hasty barefoot run toward the stream,

splashed into the water and plunged eagerly his arm under the surface 

to collect the pebbles at the shore, glistening. 

that became me, those little rocks. now we sit in his lap, 

dressed in stubborn adhesive and 

half-peeled paper, boasting half of MARINARA.

the boy presses his face to the glass. we say hi to his distorted eyes,

by way of a shimmy and muffled clinks.)

usually, i think that i am getting closer to knowing myself.

i'm getting older, which is a thing. i feel more grounded –

another thing. there is a cohesion, and roughly i adhere to it,

not by principle but by a proclivity outside of my control,

a gravitational pull that returns me to myself

in floating moments of contradiction. 

unless, of course, a convincing voice – a familiar voice –

asks me to reconsider.

(or: it must be that today the boy brought his treasure to class.

he held the jar between his hands, tightly, as the school bus jolted 

over a speed bump. the pebbles lifted, floated tentatively upwards, 

bringing loose bits of dirt along with it,

altogether making a feeble leap towards the mouth as if to escape. 

in the hallways between classes, we were jostled 

dizzy beyond recognition.) to reconsider – 

suddenly i am not sure of my wholeness, of what keeps me together in this

container of a body other than lazy convenience or divine coincidence.

sometimes i wish to have bigger rocks, more decisive rocks – fewer, but

heavier, unmovable. they wouldn't float upwards like mine do

when someone to whom i entrust myself shakes me in such a way 

that the pebbles return to different places – 

and i cannot say that they have changed me, nothing compositionally has changed – 

but i am unsettled, i become a stranger, 

i must acquaint myself again.