running out justwrite

Run out of my shoes and leave them behind so I'll find them one day on a barefoot walk by the farm and wonder why they left, then find you sitting cross-legged in the brush with dirty toes, your palms against your forehead, your chin touching your chest. You'll tell me your heartbeat feels different, and I'll hold you in my arms and murmur lullabies that smell like lavender until the old rooster falls down in the yard and all I can think of is my grandfather weeping. I can't picture his face, but I memorized the poem he sent on a postcard of a field of flowers I couldn't name. He looks like my father, my father with his eyebrows bent in concentration, shirtless and sweating by the porch in July, measuring wood. I don't remember what he built. He built everything. My hands weave string into blankets, make scarves with pockets at the ends, but can't frame doors or refinish windows. I tell you I'd keep everyone warm if I could, and the wind picks up both of us and carries you east and me south. You're smiling, waving goodbye, and I'm halfway across the ocean before I notice how cold my feet are, and I wonder if you have my shoes. Three months later, I'm in the living room with my mother and she's telling me the story of my birth. She always skips the labor and says the word "happy" a lot, her eyes full of tears, the corners of her mouth turned down. I want to hold her hands in mine, but I don't want her to see they fit. I slip her bare feet into my hands and rub them, wishing I could remember.

woods write

People walk through here a lot. They carry peanut butter sandwiches wrapped in paper, or umbrellas, or their secrets folded into lace handkerchiefs. I used to hide here, pretend I was a snowflake, but the people walking through over and over would stop to question me, introduce themselves, ask why I never change. I'd say I'm just pretending to be a snowflake. They'd hand me a million tiny mirrors, all different shapes, bite into their sandwiches, open their umbrellas, drop their lace-wrapped secrets in the stream, and keep walking. One Sunday, a girl ran through. Her hair was braided with clover and swinging about her neck. Her fingers were stretched apart, reaching to her sides. From where I was sitting, it looked like she wasn't wearing shoes.

pouring down justwrite

Pouring down the drain like discarded water from last night at two a.m. when I was dreaming about trains whose steam becomes large dogs and there was a tunnel and then I was awake, thirsty like an afternoon in church not talking. We'd always nap afterward, like prayer was so exhausting and the joints in our fingers ached from our hands clasping each other and patting the shoulders of our neighbors. Peace be with you. We said this, our tongues dry, but I've never felt closer to God than on afternoons we skipped church, the Sunday when four-year-old Elizabeth and I ate peanut butter sandwiches in the clover field next to the airport. The airplanes would come in just above us, the air around us shaking, Elizabeth curling up into the ground, her cheek pressed against grass, one eye gazing up from the space in front of her elbow, watching the sky. Summers feel like prayer, when you and I sit together beneath the slow-swinging grape vines, talking about birch trees and waiting for the rain as if it is a sure thing. The day I came back to school, half the sky was grey, down to the horizon where the mountains were throwing shadows that looked like home. I grew up on a mountain, the air clear and thin as lace. Now I sleep in a valley and try to convince myself I'm still higher than the ocean, that the earth coming up on all sides isn't trying to swallow anything but just wants to stretch, to reach up as far as possible and never fall back down. Peace be with you. My throat is so dry only God can hear me.

the best place to justwrite

The best place to hide my footprints is underneath your kitchen floor, the one that creaks at night when nobody is awake and throws shadow figures onto the unseen earth below it. The tea kettle is whispering mismatched lullabies in the morning and I am outside in the garden behind the blueberry bush. The roses died months after Mom planted them, but they still have thorns piercing the hot summer air like a scream in a field full of grass. Grass is so quiet. You're so quiet I can hardly see you. I learned to whittle last year and saw your face in every knot, your fingerprints in every imperfection. I stopped buying sandpaper and told you it's because it reminds me of the beach, the type of walking that scrapes away your skin and tries to see what's inside you. And by you I mean me, of course. I've spent my whole life trying to see my own eyes, in the unrippled surface of a lake, in my little brother's fingernails. The last place I looked was your pupils, but all I saw was a sunflower, its seeds all fallen, its petals wrinkled like my grandmother's hands. This summer walking to lunch, we saw two praying mantises. Their heads were tilted up to the sky and their voices were quiet, clear. I told her she's my luck, and she nodded without hearing me. I left my footprints under her kitchen floor. I pray.