Alone on our old checked couch—
it was black and off-white, smoke-yellowed—
in the basement TV room, I digested

the announcer’s voice as something
I should come to know, once I was older.
Who wouldn’t want to tiptoe close

to the edge of night? Who doesn’t want
a little manageable terror? It’s why
I tossed and turned for many nights,

pretending that a scary episode of Scooby Doo
was playing on the wall, on one side of my bed.
Did I want to watch it? I did, and I didn’t.

I do, and I don’t. Many nights, now,
I find it—the edge, the side
I want to be on.  

Even even people
(the evenest of evenest)
are odd sometimes.

In winter, we were unknown to each other,
strangers in corduroy, our intentions concealed
by the rows of hearts or whales on our sweaters.
In winter, there was no Florinda Circle to speak of
and no creek, though every year, at least one of us
found it, alone, digging under the snow with an
I Heart Snow Freaky Freezies mitten, laying
one ear down on the ice as if we could hear it,
next summer’s mica swirling, bubbles from
the crawdads (crayfish?) rising in their sleep.

Butter the toast with great feeling.
At this moment, whether the audience hears you
scraping a plastic knife on a sandpaper block
is more important than your pulse.

Will you eat a rice cake?
Now we are rats gnawing through wood.

Some of these footsteps don’t tell a story
and they keep us from sounds that do tell a story,
so I’m getting rid of some footsteps,
and these sailors can just levitate for a while.

Will you open the door?
Will you shut the door?
Will you knock on the door?
Will you creak the door?

Will you feel this with me—the slow climb
to the top of the hill, and then we fly?
It goes so fast. I promise it will.

In your life,
have you seen where we are
holding a banquet

for your beautiful experience
of a turquoise velour tracksuit,
and you don’t even have to attend,
we’ll mail you your award

at the lodge where you live
so you can hang it from the rafters
for all to admire as they ski in

and ski out, muttering your name
under their frozen breath
like a spell to prevent injuries,
the smaller ones, sprains and strains,

let’s say—and you will bask
in the fireside glow glinting from
your medal as it dangles there,

spinning because you have installed
a turntable, a modified disco ball,
but no one here dances, no one
will even try, and maybe that’s why

no one has a medal except you?

I will be out of the office
because I have become

tiny

with limited access to
the bathtub drain

because I might slip down
at last, the threat made real,

the worst having happened.
If this is an emergency,

then you must care about me
a little, after all. Leave your

name. We won’t need it
where you and I are going.

Yes, the cereal from Quaker. That’s what I mean.
Have you ever known me to say something
I don’t mean? Have you ever known me?

Every day, I build my fortress,
extruded, sugared oat fibers within,
cereal boxes on all sides without.

You could find me humming away inside,
like the sweat bee in the crook of your elbow,
tasting your sweat, wondering if you’re worth a sting.

After the accolades I got, I had as much to learn about life as
that sense of history, three hundred feet into a tiny creekbed.
You know what? She wasn’t the delightful moonshine.
I introduced myself to the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders:
They were my audience—we were holed up at the tunnel.
I don’t think there’s any question that my mistake was
a comfy house in Studio City. Riding on the backs of manta rays,
the launching pad that would forgive you for being a storm,
everything went unforgiveable, a mountain that is the music,
the singing violins and crashing cymbals. Casa Vega, a star.

So then like Cheryl said to Kevin
we should catch a crawdad
or a garter snake in the creek
the one behind the Souders’ old house
on Florinda Circle, the creek with all the mica
if you shuffle your feet, and then
you try to catch it to make gold jewelry
or just a lot of gold that you could sell sometime
but anyway, we said we would catch a crawdad
or a snake, put it in a Halloween bucket
from McDonald’s last year, see if we could
figure out how to feed it, maybe take turns
having it live in our garage until our mom found it
then it would be the next person’s turn
I wore my jelly shoes, the clear ones
with glitter in them, swirling like mica
I got little rocks stuck in my jelly shoes on the bottom
you know how it has like little holes?
so then I skated on the rocks in my jelly shoes
in the sunlight, all the way home
or maybe to your house.

The problem is, how many pennies to circle
for a pink eraser, or how many whistles for a quarter,
and I don’t know. I put my head down on my desk.
Now, we are watching a magenta-toned filmstrip

about wheat production in Russia, but I am
hiding my worksheet in the cage of my arms,
working on it at the wrong time

until someone sees it,
tells on me to Mrs. Habbedank.
Everything here is old, except math.
All the kids here are snotty tattletales.

How long will it be—how will I bear it—until
I circle some of them, some of them circle me?