made to grow their hair

wear a red velvet dress

play Goldilocks

everyone thought them a girl

called them adorable

most simply weren’t looking

some paid attention

they weren’t cute

they were dangerous

disturbing to the order of things

what does it mean when a galaxy is found

only by accident in the background view

and it is an odd one that should not exist

isolated dwarf shining with giant red branch stars

now one of the farthest observed

this no practical help for any small hard tasks

the ordinary commonplace things often taken for granted

yet there is solace in such discoveries and wonder

nightly I throw myself to the skies

I live among those gone the same as those present.

I walk forgotten roads like the streets outside my door.

I sing ancient songs with the mournful ease of a modern dirge.

Thus I am and have long pondered my liminal state.

What will death mean to one who has always dwelt in transition?

Every year in late autumn, the sky lost its summer softness;

The air turned cold and crisp; the leaves formed a vegetal carpet underfoot

As my father and I walked the boundaries of the land.

I explored the small house on the hill inhabited by some unknown number of greats grandmother

Where she chose to be alone for reasons never explained

And found her old cream crockery milking jug still in its place by the door.

I clambered into the loft of the log barn to find that the builder,

Another unknown number of greats grandfather, had stored his axe beneath the eaves.

I left it there with its rusted blade and yet sturdy wooden handle,

Too heavy for my seven year old self to safely carry.

Though I loved the stories that lived there, I knew that they were not mine;

That they were not all; that many other stories could be told.

I felt no difference when I stepped through the rusted barbed wire fence

Separating our fields from the neighbors,

And when I followed one of the several small creeks through multiple farms,

The water that flowed remained the same, only sometimes with cows on the banks.

We no longer lived there, never had since before my birth, and I wondered what made it ours.

A piece of paper seemed a made-up thing, as imaginary as the boundary lines,

As unreal as the notion that land could be owned.

Might as well say we also possessed the light above, the hoots of the owls at night,

And the wind that sometimes rattled the old windmill generator.

Purely silly, I thought, and another thing in the world I would never understand.

Suddenly without warning

Picked up lifted unknowing

I slammed into the floor.

How with so little weight

From so short a distance

Did I hit so hard?

Bruises purple on multiple limbs;

Abraded cuts seep blood;

Joints threaten new pain.

Am I my body?

Am I my body?

Am I my body?

(Yes)