renaître; être éphémère

we were all young once, netting our fingers to

                              catch stray stars, pennies tumbling down a well.

was it real? or was it a dream, a kaleidoscope of memories

                              that escape my mind, that keep me up at night:

pinpoints of light against the pads of my

                              fluttering fingers, a phosphorescent hum,

static and secondary colors.

                              i was baptized in the aisle of a 7-eleven,

a paper girl haloed in shards of glass

                              holding my head in her lap as i cradled

fireflies between wandering fingers.

                              born again in the glory of the taste

of iron on my tongue and the ringing in my

                              ears, i was crowned queen of fluorescent lights

and waltzed away the washed sepia on the backs

                              of my eyelids until all that remained was technicolor

and the rainbows cast across the wall,

                              light reflecting off an angel’s broken halo.

i ache for those days when i felt nothing,

                              where i could twirl under gas station lights and

cup fireflies in my palm without fearing they would fly away.

                              now i close my fingertips around a hundred tiny wings and

a hundred tiny dandelion seeds, afraid to waste wishes on

                              a past life, a past youth where i still did not know

the difference between a sonnet and a soliloquy, where

                              my butterfly wrists still did not know the path into ether,

where my tired tread still did not know the way home.