She presses tensed hands together, imitating
two frenzied young boys in a fight, landing a blow,
and pools out an exhale like her very soul is floating off,
suitcase full and spilling over with words she didn't say –
all to give away to someone who could spin them off better on
the tip of their tongue like a basketball on a player's pointer.
There's the pause where a million thoughts
collide,
a bigger bang
obliterating thousands of her registered comets, crashing into stars and
galaxies once coveted for their river's azure glow in the lens of
some cheap camera buried in a pawn shop,









overpriced and film frail.

She'll regard the thought as a writer would a blankly lined paper
where no words will form and the ink smears the meanings of the ones
that do,
before pressing the creased corners of her wrists to each other,
watching mesmerized as one would be after hiding
from the lost paths of rain
drops
and awkward, necessary niceties – 'scuse me, sorry, pardon, pardon – in
the hustle of a crowded school;
the irrigated interior of the umbrella reflecting
the rain
drops'
last will upon the colourful exterior field yawning below the sky..
she hasn't missed the rainbow yet, but
exertion of pressure fading like retreating clouds against
the sun's UV presence,
a finger slides over recycled skin's
creation of white snow crests spilling over iron-oxide landfills
stretching into peasant-rationed speed bumps
across her wrists,
a vertical highway of its own with no divider, though
few had dared to speed off the taut cliffs in hopes,
wild and desperate
to reach that horizon as the sun







bubbled









over.

Two X's are released from the other's company,
remain level, always near and watching in silver paranoia;
her eyes study them like an exhausted teacher would scrutinize
a muddled test of messy script and misplaced answers,
just wondering
if any attempt was made.
Given time, she explains the strategic marking of the
tendons beneath, spinning a heartbeat like the core of a good poem's rhythm,
and mashes them back together
as one would flatten cookie dough in a pan,
unsatisfied.

"It's a long road," she says, and ever the poor conversationalist
with sturdy eye contact mismatched from her mumbling tone
perpetually stuck in the library where she dare not
raise her voice or her self-worth.
"It's so I know when I run out of gas –
y'know me, I'd miss that refueling station and
I'm near empty already..
wouldn't have enough to keep on –
at least now
I know where the nearest exit is. I'm okay
pushing myself there." Funny lilt of her lips,
some semblance to a smile with her last regards to
optimism's sense of humour and
how she never had it,





but tried to.

She pressed weakened hands together, drops them,
limp as a dove's clipped, featherless wings,
like one tired young lady begging for respite, maybe
just one rest stop.