There is Coke-A-Cola sitting on my bedside from 3 days ago. 

I am drinking the sun and wondering if my skin will be transparent to the light. 

I have scoliosis: my spine isn’t strong or straight enough to see over the wind, pulling me back. 

And at every party I go to someone tells me I have a sad face. 

I take it as an insult, it’s discrediting and disgracing your game, your craft. 

At least I can’t be lonely with sirens outside of my door. 

I want “CURED” on a neon sign for Easter, a rehabilitation, a normal life. 

I wash my face at night, while the Earth is on billows of fire as the warmth approaches. 

At the dinner table, we are told not to speak our minds as if the wars will wait until tomorrow. 

If students could hear themselves over the gunshots, we’d all be scientists. 

We all dreamt of being astronauts, instead, we traveled to space with a bullet wound and not a rocket ship. 

I will rock you like a baby, tell you to sleep, that the screams are just another lullaby; & you do &  you do & you do, in my arms on the warm-wet carpeted floor. 

I will look down and think to myself “dang, this stain will never come out.”

Still, we tell our children to go out and live life abundantly, letting them run into the hard metal of this cage. 

We sell Earth like it’s a house that was once a crime scene: “It has good bones. There is a true vision here, a real opportunity, a beautiful life.” 

So I’ll sit in the garden, and pretend I can treat us like a plant, and water us until we grow.