Eek. My skin seems to fit not quite right. Wind chaps it rough and flaky, lips no longer smooth but much bitten. Hair grows in the strangest places. Even though I sleep the slumber of a dilettante, I guzzle coffee to stay awake at work. And the earth's tilt seems different/does anyone else notice?

Maybe last night's earthquake/more like terrestrial burp/still resonates within me, unsettling the flesh and bone and blood of me. Everything/maybe maybe/just doesn't seem to fit right.

//

Deep into winter or almost spring, when the trees still stretch bare and dark under the overturned soup bowl of a sky, she becomes yet another sort of creature, a creature deep in hibernation.

Under blanket, huddled near a heater, purring Beast in crook of limb, she dreams of women hanging while children watch impassively and bandit queens who teach their daughters how to infiltrate the enemy. Sometimes she rouses herself from slumber and tries to make order/out of dreams and desires, memories of events witnessed and barely understood, possible avenues of the future, home.

//

"This was the first reason for my own writing, my need to say things I couldn't say otherwise when I couldn't find other poems to serve."�Audre Lorde in an interview with Adrienne Rich

//

Under my pillow lies a black notebook thick with notes-to-self, disparate facts, and mostly lists: groceries, places to go, words tickling titillation, books to read and zines to order, music to hunt down, movies to maybe watch when my attention span stretches long and not too thin, stories to flesh out, what to avoid, people to write, ideas of future stories like seeds unplanted.

In the notebook I plot maybe-maybe plans. Hamburg to see Lars in the spring and maybe visit Niva in Paris during summer? A children's book before I re-enter school? But only if I turn in my major proposal before March and . . .

//

Now I'm restless/old story, yes?/I watch each day stretch, purr/this creature hibernates, her skin itchy for spring/maybe maybe/in spring, old skin is shed for another, more supple one, stretched gleaming smooth, finally, new skin/new dreams/new ideas/better suited to the blood and bone and flesh of myself.

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