The full moon pulls

at my womb

through the clouded 

afternoon sky 

my own body 

beats me from inside

but I’m just glad my parents

only ever smothered me 

with love

a crab shell 

fits snugly on my body

but who has time

to sink inside 

                        and outside

                        the sky clouds over for you

                                 rains for you

                        I want to scream and I want to know if this is just the moon                

       grabbing at my chest or if I have a right to cry? 

                                             I was at a booth

                                                      in the dining hall

                                                               when I saw the email

                                          and I cried

                  tears spilling slowly over my mask

                                                   and I wanted to cry harder but I was afraid

to cry alone

in public 

so I stuffed my grief into my little backpack

with my laptop and the notebooks

and the book I was supposed to read

and I carried it with me to a meeting 

and forgot to hear it grumbling and scratching at the seams 

                                                            and every day the yellow leaves fall

                                                                                  and the red leaves fall

                                                                     and the orange leaves fall

                                                         and every spring the green leaves grow 

but I like this foliage

the way it is

                                                   what happens to a red orange yellow leaf

                                                                                                                        shriveled 

                                                                                          no longer pretty enough to be the                                              background of an 

                                                               Instagram photo

                                                                        what happens to a leaf brown and crusted,                                                                                        stepped on?

You’re just a fallen leaf 

                                                                                       Why do I wonder

                                                                                       who found you

                                                                                       and how you did it?

All our branches are bare 

         and we feel ashamed of our nudity

                                                                        so we stand apart 

                                                and snatch at the distant sun

            who clocks out early now

            and we can only hope to be cut down 

            into log after log

            and burned, given

            purpose, warmth, then peace

                                                         or root down, hold firm

and bear the winds until our leaves dress us

again

and our barked bones bask in spring

                                                                                                and nobody here gets me

                                                                                       did anyone here get you?

                                                where’s the forestry of college?

individual trees, competing 

but we’re all empty and 

                                                                     no one picks us for Christmas  

Last night a squirrel was crying, writhing on the street outside my dorm 

                        my friend said that a professor said 

                        no one could help it

                        and who could know better than a professor here?

            when to put something out of its misery?

we keep walking in our misery

we type papers in our misery

we sit in class in our misery

we isolate 

in our 

misery

                                                we forget that we’re not alone in our misery

                        scrape my naked branches with yours

To walk across this bridge

is to suspend yourself 

in this moment. Breathe.  

Center yourself 

between the cascading creek 

and the vast Vermont sky,

until the flow of the falls 

harmonizes with your breath.

You are the rippling river 

below, the boundless sky above.

You are present.

I’m running on South Street

alongside sparrows swooping 

through the bitter rain

and surfing across shallow puddles;

In shallow puddles I have no reflection;

I have no reflection but for in my mind. 

October bites me icy pink and blue—

and I miss the warmth of her pumpkin sweater. 

On my way home I buy a pumpkin,

and at home I carve it open  

and crawl into its slimy seedy womb

in hopes hibernation will come early this year—

Hibernation was forced early last year,

but I think I want it forever. I think I forgot how to think

out here where it stinks with the smell of rotten gasoline

leaking from the old motorbike that passed by me on my run.

The burn still hangs loosely in my nostrils 

knocking on the door to my brain,

seeping under the door frame,

whispering a softly degrading lullaby.

a car approaches

rumbling          rumbling            rumbling           rumbling

crunching         crunching          crunching          crunching

down the dirt road

that cleaves 

the 

grassy fields; adoptive sky;  

and the 

rambling         rambling         rambling         rambling

curving           curving           curving            curving 

otter creek

the car departs

its weakening roar 

relief

how can I feel so peacefully alone,

among so much life?

the water 

debuts herself;

shedding stiff ice, 

she rapidly folds 

wrinkling forward

with amoral force.

her elegant

gestures 

displayed 

in the eroding edges 

of her container

the trees along her path

reach up their veiny arms

and point me towards the sky

the vast abyss

above

earth pulls me back down

with a glimpse of movement

in the brush

what looks to be a raccoon tail

I watch him forage in the bushes

splash!

despite the river’s name, I’d never seen 

an otter 

my eyes drift to it

swimming just beneath the surface

its submarine eyes and head

a speck of darkness

my curiosity 

verges on asexual voyeurism 

as I stand on my side of the creek

the otter swims left

and the raccoon scurries right

and I’m torn

two roads diverged

and in my hesitancy

I fail to follow either 

on the walk back

I ruminate 

in a twenty minute voice memo

on the “human gaze”

and my insistence on observing other animals

in their habitats

while expecting privacy in my own

I want to wear the hill as a dress, swaddle myself in dirt and trees and the October foliage in the 5:17 p.m. light of this specific evening. We speed past. The fleeting nature of the foliage, and this moment, makes fashion impossible but glory inevitable. I cloak my mind with the hill instead. I smile at the white sheets cut into ghouls hanging from the trees outside homes but think, doesn’t fall decorate itself quite nicely enough? When we get home I want to peel the Halloween-themed gel stickers off our living room window and tear down the faux-spiderwebs draped on the porch. I mutter something about not understanding decorations and you agree, but you’re just visiting, and my roommates love festivities. So the stickers stay. In bed, I decorate you with my spit, and the beauty of the moment is in its evanescence. There’s nothing evanescent about plastic decorations, except that one day we’ll choose to take them down; I think I get it. Sometimes when the crisp Vermont air frolics in my nostrils and the mountains suck the sun into them and its warped colors decorate the sky, I feel anxious that it won’t last and that there’s no way for me to save the feeling it gives me. I worry that I might waste all my moments like this. How can I savor a taste I can’t name? What kind of decoration am I for the earth, I wonder. Should I drape my nude figure against the earth’s dewy curvature? If words can adorn then I’ll write––I’ll write with my body what my mind can’t articulate, and move the air with my limbs, ornaments of movement. We decorate with Time, to colonize it. While we carve pumpkins, then turkeys, and slit the throats of pine trees, and finally ornament ourselves in plastic glasses shaped like our future—what do we hope will change with the numbers on the calendar? That certain slant touches us earlier, and fades quickly. Does it remind you of your own mortality? Darkness isn’t so scary when there’s nothing conscious to perceive it. A supernova of leaves, the performance of their lifetime, gently perish under our feet. Bare branches shiver and giggle off snow: “Get naked!” Strip! Disassemble! Dismantle! But we cover ourselves up. With distractions, decorations, celebrations of the mundanity of the passage of time. On the full moon, more or less, that celestial body spotlights the spotting in my underwear and holds my maternity, and its ever-waning ability, on painful display. But aha! she certainly wanes too, and I think now, upon reflection, with a calm uterus, why don’t I savor the pain? As darkness shuts the slant, I press on, confident.

Soundless night, snug with darkness yet vast

in infinite white, soft coldness,

Listening 

To the whirring and banging of the washers and the dryers communicating with each other

Existing 

Doing as we bid them

An endless routine circular motion

Tumbling tumbling

Tumbling from the sky infinitesimal snowflakes

Fall into clumps, fall all over each other 

Crowded lightness in the night 

Makes me want to WHOOP as I make my footprints 

And laugh up to the clouds 

For covering us up and our land and our buildings and machines and roads and

Reminding us that we can be magical 

But it’s so easy to forget 

There’s something peaceful about being alone, 

About being alone in the laundry room,

as I wait for my clothes to dry 

And there’s something alive about it 

About the washers and dryers 

We coexist and breathe

And just beyond the window pane

The clouds breathe and the snow breathes

And falls and we all fall

And tumble

And stumble

And rinse

And repeat

Breathing

Together