new notebook, new justwrite

Good as new fireflies, flashing their taillights for the first time as if it's nothing special, but inside they're burning, not like lamps lit too close to the sheets or a cookie tray to the bare hand, but like tasting morning air for the first time in five months, finding a peace so calm even the wind seems still at first. She dances on sidewalk lines under the moon's pale face, framed by a crown of planets budding like roses carved out of gems. She digs into the Earth with each breath, planting emptiness and wondering why nothing ever grows, why the rainy season always brings ice, which isn't so bad because every time dancing in hail feels like the first time, tiny soft pebbles landing in her hair, thinking it's a wing and that the other one must be nearby because without two you can only glide, and even then you need to be somewhere high enough to jump off. When the ground races toward the sky, she slips and falls, thought only a few inches because one foot was already under the grass, planting its metaphorical roots in the dew, roots which she can think of later and wonder what they soaked in, brandy or poison or expensive perfume, though all are basically the same if you break it down to chemicals. She pulls herself up again and tells the cresting sun she knows how much time has passed. She doesn't really but neither does the sun, yawning, squinting at the harshness of the waning dark left over from the night before. I turn my thoughts inside out but don't like that side either. I give them all to her anyway, and she laps them up, says they dance on her tongue like saffron's sleepy steps and pepper's brief infatuations. I blush but she can't see it, decides my face is always that color, and it is really, as though poison has crept up through my soles and planted itself just below the skin. She knows what that's like, and she doesn't judge. I grab the end of her scarf before she can slip away into the dawn, not expecting it to tear because I've never noticed it's woven from leaves until now.