There is a fairytale I’ll never tell you, the one

where the ground was nothing but a mouth waiting

to suck in the winds that forgot to blow

severed dandelion heads pirouetted in the air

like mothballs shadowing the saucer

of the sun, how it’s beams bubbled the backs

of our necks, they grew gardens of red

that itched and multiplied like weeds

the rings I used to wear fell and clattered

like pennies in a fountain, the children bent down

to fish them from the humming blades of grass

it almost sounded like a

bee body when it rode through

on the well-rings of thought in

the stiff summer air,

but there were no yellow-spangles to see

only little white crossbows,

aerial back-benders that

swam into sight and speech, that bristled above

a body of warning bells and skin cells

all of us listening from below

the wrinkled pages of our eyelids rustled

I sniffed the air for the scent of your hair

and my hand closed around nothing but wisps of sensor fusion

I won’t say that unpeopled jets circled us then
like white eyes in the cotton stalks
acrobats turning up green roots
I hid you beneath your bed and
I wondered whose map we were flashing on,
a red dot jumping from whose pages, whose screen
I cannot explain to you how
I didn’t want us to blink out in a wash of white

how everyone on the island of that red dot
felt to me then like the sapling whose growth
I measure with a yard stick
making climbing marker ticks year by year

they were the straight lined seismograph,
the smooth pebbles that pave our yard
their cries were yours when I cooed you to sleep

everyone looking skyward then was to me

the promise of rain on a bleeding thumb.

LAURA FAIRGRIEVE