Sure, take away my rights

i. 

What makes me think I am owed them? Am I more precious than the river? Hear this: I am AS precious as the river.

I’m tired of these government handouts: hate, violence, prophecy. It’s all in your hands, carry it—mine are covered in mud thick as clay as January ice as silence. 

ii.

I hate this daily task of un-making. I wake up and tell myself: Nothing is as it seems or could be.

I go out where the cat crosses the road and geese fly north in February. I take my keys out of my jacket and throw them in the fields. I hope a mouse eats them.

I hope a rat steals them and makes a door to his house with them. I hope someone finds the rat’s nest later and stands open-mouthed amazed at the poetics of it all.

Most of all I hope the rat comes back to me, keys clutched in his hands all desperate, like he knows it’s all I/he has, so I can chuck them again. I do this daily and the next day: start again.

iii.

Hurry up, Mr. President. Hurry up anthills and grasshopper feast. I’m on my back the way you like me. No, it’s not a trick. Okay it is, you caught me. Hands up,

shoot me where my eye is as blue as a jay feather. Did you know—it’s not really blue. It’s an illusion—Mirror, mirror, who’s the most deluded of them all?

iv.

I called my mother and she told me to calm down. Get a grip already. Pay my rent on time for once, jeesh. I throw my back out trying to pull myself together. I burn the house down cooking a steak cause my iron is low which means

I’m not absorbing a n y t h i n g.

The woods take me in, all knees and grubby elbows. They tolerate me. The deer bathe me in the river, those patient fuckers. They make me fall in love again, by which I mean: I feel soft and it terrifies.

v.

It’s not over until it’s over. My father took a punch when he was little and asked me to hold him back! Such small arms. I imagine them like oil pipes under the Mississippi. One puncture away from colossal damage. One human fuck up from an infinity of retribution.

What animal can see furthest? I ask the police officer when he pulls me over for skipping town. Raven? That’s the one I want to be. He shrugs and says he’ll let me go this time with a warning. What I don’t tell him: I am so far beyond warning.

vi.

Enough already, my grandmother says when she forgets my name. Who needs it? I call the bird outside my window the name of some dead guy and he barely flinches. I’m becoming flexible. I do yoga every Tuesday so I can breeeeeaaaaatttttthhhhhhheeeeee. It’s childish.

This poem. I know what they’ll say. Fuck it—We’re all washed up now, covered in plastic beer rings like manatees, every small turtle heart. Every frog egg. Damn it.

Now I’m picturing small things so tiny and cute and utterly vulnerable I want to flip the table. Instead I go to the park with my niece and she says ball. And I say you’re goddamn right kid. Ball. Ball ball ball ball ball ball. We do it all night. We take the sound home with us.

We walk through the streets in protest. We pump our fists to the fucking sky. Ball we say. Ball ball ball ball ball ball ball.