though our travels could not brag of anything but the minor. Most days we never made it out of the bottle. Mimosa seedpods like a switch of leather between our thumbs, snails sheening across the sidewalk in a brief and silver art, we were pirates of seeing the quiet thing. We rooted for the ants who found the colored sugar spill hauling emeralds across the kitchen counter. We praised the black widow who spackled five starry sacs against the clanger of the bell. My life, my agenda, how it hurt to pry off that pronoun like a swollen cork but when its absence became a comfortable wound, (my) life kept its borders open, relieved of the burden of definition. We aimed our twiggy arrows at the sun, fed animals with our hands, and with a clan privacy ate dinner on the floor. It was hard not to slip into nostalgia while still immersed: confusing the tenses when I cast behind what was present as if to prepare myself for the years ahead when they would orbit outward from the focus of our choral gaze. I am supposed to say I wanted to devour them, I wanted to run away, that I was tired and worn like a groove, and sometimes I wanted to read all day and mostly I wore sweatpants and sometimes I yelled and everything was dreadfully unclean, but being with my sons every day was most like theater snow, a tiny hidden source above our heads cranking out the dust, always a shock how it lit up the dark. Terrible cliché, I knew it would go fast, could feel the gallop beneath our perpetual chase game. True, my life, good horse, trotted back as I was warned it would not, rearranged in fractals and without the same iron grasp. And when I said how much I loved the hours: the concerning stares, I was a helicopter, I was a bore, surely obsessed, I must have lost my feminist edge somewhere in the Lego bin but before the world got a piece of them we were in a snowglobe, a glass womb filled with the amniotic of our own awe. We were mighty and no one saw us. We rescued lizards from a sudden cold, we made drums out of every single thing. We hid from each other and told each other where we were hiding.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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