Back to school. The biting Pacific chill worms
down my shirt and dips under my hollow waistband.
It is September, the air reeks of winter, and meagerly armed
with a backpack and a biology text, I walk with arms spread eagle
into a pile of brown leaves, already wilted.

Back to school. Did you know
that first period English is always warmer
than pulling the sheets up to your neck
in the bed of a near-stranger? a church pew acquaintance?
I nap amongst the classics: Salinger, Hawthorne.
Dickinson is my pillow. Sexton is my blanket.
I stitch myself a jacket made of words
so I can stop being so goddamn cold.

Sticks and stones shatter my bones but their words
rake my soul dry. I am shuddering in a strange bed in an empty house
and texting my first love to tell her I can’t be hers
if I can’t even be mine. Be home. Belong to anyone.
I wail. The dog can hear me, at least.

Back to school? Not today. I walk down to Starbucks,
pour a drip coffee. Buy myself an apple. Sit at the bench.
When the sky turns pink and then golden, I think I will be okay.
Keep fighting. Keep fighting. If you have no bed
and only a backpack to rely on, if you are seventeen
and so scared your mind has blackened,
if you have never truly learned what it means to not be alone
then I do believe that you know what it’s like
to watch the sky turn color and think, Well, that’s it.