Timescale

I faked a letter from the future to my future self

to say something so trivial as: when you lose

ten pounds cut off your hair. If I could really

write my former self a letter from the future

I would say lay down the axe: most of what you hate

you’ll won't ten years from now. Although, knowing

myself, that might just incite her. Hard to say. Fifteen

was really volatile. So were all the other years. 

I’d fear that kid might lay an axe on me, her future

self, for only being me, for being what she feared she was

but couldn’t even whisper to her self. She’d kill me
if I put it here, that dirty word she never once wrote down. 

She’d hate it but she isn't right. Right? She’ll love
who she’ll become, can’t she see? She can't see me.

She’s too busy counting pounds like rosary beads, her ribs
like rungs. She's too busy wringing her hands in fear
that she is what she fears she is (and she is). She is
and she is and she isn't, anymore, me. She's busy
writing letters to her future self, who's busy righting wrongs
she set up for herself in self-destruction. Those letters
always disappointed her, filled with questions that time
had made childish. When I was a child, at times, I thought
that I'd never see twenty five. If that girl met me
what she'd see is the weight I put on. That girl
weighs on me. Fifteen, with something sharp.

the tears are always hot and the pain is always sharp and the guilt is cold and laden with cream like a mousse and the scales have been sitting in the back of the room in a row since last week and the crying jags too frequent and sudden and unruly, the tea lukewarm the legs unshaven pants too short for socks too high in the too-quiet hall to the too-quiet stairs where i think good lord i could shoot myself. 

Wednesday

I tried to do everything right but the sadness sunk in with a depth and a vengeance, soaking through all that it touched. The way it felt was wrong and unlike I’d imagined. I wasn’t excited for anything. I missed not being anxious. I missed the woods and snow. I miss that cheap and fleeting feeling, feeling beautiful. If I was an oyster I’d shut tight my two doors, bunker down. If I was a whale, I’d open wide my baleen and let the ocean in. Instead I feel my facial features deadening. I feel my cheeks becoming fat, forlorn. I feel exasperated about even the one downy feather that drifts on the subway car floor, freed from some puffy jacket. I despise the fact my stop is coming and I think of ways to delay standing up. None come to mind. 

Cross Country, Cook County, Minnesota

My skis are two sighs taking turns in the snow,

tracing two parallel paths through the woods.

The tracks that I’m making won’t ever kiss, existing forever

hip-width apart, or at least until spring rushes in,

adamant to flush the creeks with snowmelt.

I leap from leg to leg on narrow strips of fiberglass,

an untrained dancer in a series of perilous poses,

each pulling me deeper into the trees. The woods, old and tall,

make a doll of my body, young, small, and each branch is frosted

with snow like a wedding cakes, making the forest

a delicate lace. Each whisper of the wind lifts the snow,

provoking the sky to flash with a flutter of winking.  

When I pause to listen to my breath and to the stillness,

I hear instead some empty loudness, deep and clear,

perhaps an echo of everything happening far from here

melted into one insistent sound. The half-faded map

that is nailed to the tree reads in tiny red print: you are here.