title:
portrait of a tiny girl facing something so large
that it defies all known words with which to contain it:
or
title: portrait of something so large it is also called tiny girl
see, i am the girl
walking on saturday mornings where the air is still empty like two am
i cross every sidewalk like someone with nothing to lose
in a world where everyone else
has only just started playing the game
title: portrait of tiny girl who walks into oncoming traffic with so much confidence that the man smoking a cigarette on his front porch stoop across the street takes a last breath for her
i see my reflection in passing car windows
a skyline is looking back at me
see, i am the girl
maybe i am this city, too
title: portrait of tiny girl who is also a city
i am the girl and the city
i am looking for a way home
home is not a city
i am a city
i am not a home
nothing inhabitable, no more than a resting place between here or there
here or there
neither is more than a resting place for words with bigger purpose
words with places bound around their ankles, tying them to where their roots once grew
rootless girl
transplant child
when nowhere is tying you down
life is just a long winded walk home
down a street everyone else forgot about
shadowed to a sunlit road
the precipice of something extraordinary
but never quite there
see, i never was quite there
how fitting -
the place my legs take me first
is in the heart of the city
and uninhabitable to anyone with a home
or a heartbeat
title: portrait of tiny girl without a heart who still pumps blood
i think i am most at home with the dead
because at least they are planted somewhere
they do not have to know an life untethered;
time does not exist for them -
and i always feel like i'm running out
title: portrait of tiny girl who realized the song that reminded her of herself
was the song about the dead girl
to put it simply
i am the girl in the city
i am the city
a city is not a home
i am the city whose legs took her to a cemetery instead of a home
maybe they are the same thing
title: portrait of tiny girl following the woman with one foot in the grave
my clothes smell like my grandmother's now
bitter and tobacco stained,
like all the broken promises i made my mother
are living in the fabric
she crawled into bed with me last week
and told me i smelled like smoke
i wondered how she could not see that i have been on fire this whole time
