Sometimes swings that dangle from big oak trees

are made of wood. Have you ever considered that? And sometimes this doesn’t mean anything at all, but sometimes the grass that grows at the foot of a hill gets more and more brown, and sometimes in the middle of a yard there is a shed with a fence behind it.

There has never been a reason for me to spend my own chosen, given time in a shed that is painted white like the bricks of a wall. There are much more interesting clovers and trees and strangely colored rocks, and sometimes the only thing that matters in the summer is strawberries. And sometimes it’s watermelon, but I don’t think that’s really what matters.

Sometimes refrigerators are impossibly tall. Don’t you remember when they used to be? Counters were long and televisions were wide, and it was okay to crawl into someone’s lap when all you really needed was to use your eyes to watch the pictures change.

I’ve never written a poem in which I’ve expressed love for someone wholly, irrevocably, and without its share of tragedy. but when I close my eyes, or even when I am able to travel without closing them at all, I know in the deepest part of my heart that no matter what my father has put me through, I would still give up almost anything just to bend myself in a way that makes my body fit in the passenger’s seat of his car again.