(places)

I.

          There is a place in me, when I shake household lamps, any lamp-like containers within sight and reach, hoping to wake up a genie, wishing more for the magic than for the three wishes. When I give it up, if only because the genies are simply out-of-commission. When I am more skeptical about reason, not seeing a benefit of the Doubt.

          There is a place in me, when it stops raining, when I go outside and pace the wet street on my bicycle, for hours. Dreaming. When I stop, beneath dark chandeliers of glass globes and spindly pine needles, clocks of pale needles spraying towards the sky, towards me, towards the ground. Fanning outwards from the limbs of sloth Giants, who bow to children and their doggy friends and bend their bristly arms into upside down arches—upside down because their round elbows bowl downwards towards the ground, form the base of a half circle that the light and the rain and the wind fall through. Their slow hands sway in a great noble reach to the clouds, which leaves the children and dog-children in awe, and when the wind shows up, the great boughs shake small magic all over the dog-eared believers; glass worlds of flipped children, so small you can frame them with your thumb and index finger.

          When I stop there, and the trees send extra wet splashes to my scalp, and I can feel the round shape of the drops before they break in my hair.

          When I take the chance of looking up, see how long it takes before a raindrop falls in my eye, see what the rain looks like when you look straight up into it, to where it's falling from. When a close call closes my right eye with a force, turns my face downwards to the damp dirt that cakes the edge of the cracked cement, to the potholes and dips that house wide open puddles, when I gaze into a puddle and it's transparent, and I see the hole in the street underneath which is a girl gazing up at the sky beneath her.

          When I try to imagine the point where our two worlds meet, somewhere in the surface of the puddle. When there is no stable plane for the horizon between the two, there is no place to go to be between, except the place in each world where both meet.

          When I find my feet, and the hard wet surface that they fall to, when the toe of my sneakered foot flicks the kickstand, flicks it up flicks it down in a half circle motion, and I back up the bicycle so the pedals are ready for me to take off with rocket power; right pedal up, at the top of its cycle, left pedal down, a half cycle away.

          There is a place in me when my feet tread the air, so far above the clouds that my tangled hair drags dirt and leaves along the wood-chipped ceiling. When I see with my eyes that I'm a helium balloon that anyone let go of, that's finding the ceiling, floating up with a force that feels as heavy as my body, as strong as my feet touching ground, the pull that brings them to the ground. When I'm a helium balloon suspended an arm's length from the ceiling, caught against a band of black rubber, the opposite of a seat, between two pinchy chains of oil-black links.

          When I swing there, a million miles of blue and white air below my feet, the drop so far that I can't see any ground, and I am lucky that as I pump my legs and swing in a half cycle back and forth, I'm falling up.

          There's a very long, very small since between here and that place in me when I walk the nothingness above the ceilings of my house, stepping carefully over the rises in every doorway.

          Between here and that place when I'm breathlessly uncomfortable, caught against my giant brother's shoulder with the strongest force, strong as the heaviest weight of my body, falling me up like magic, like the anchored lamps that fall up and shed light down.

          When my giant brother calls me a Sack O' Potatoes, when he flips the world upside down and walks with his feet way above, touching the shoe-worn lusterless wood and unvaccuumed carpets, sprinkled with debris from outside and bits of yarn, the surface above me. The floor way below my feet is bright and blank, with an occasional spider that sticks out black against white, attracting my eye like a beacon. It's otherwise clean and lonely, repelling furniture feet, the feet of my friends and family, the feet of my giant brother magnetically, til they're unbudgingly far away and untouchable, like the light that falls up and sheds light down, like the anchored lamps lit with Sadly, the speedless magic of For Good.

          And through the long, small since stretches a freeway with alongside ditches, where muskrat guts and raccoon skulls and hollow squirrel carcasses go. And all the crows of my lifetime that got into the garbage on brisk Monday mornings decompose there. They were sentenced to decompose there the moment I set eyes on them and forgot, lost them to tear open their huge black presents, wrapped with hefty black plastic and perfumed with rotting peels and rancid pulp and wet paper, tied off at the top in a knot, or in a stretched plastic bow, or in stretched red knots. Mystery prizes dragged out to the street by the mailbox just for them, collections of lost and discarded and forgotten smelly pieces for the crows, who sleep on their collections of lost things in huge itchy nests by the wastewater runoffs that lead to the lake.

          All those crows of my lifetime go as masters of the lost to the alongside ditches and decompose there; they bring treasures like pipe caps that We As Children hopped on to throw the question, Water Gas Or Nothing?

          And they forget---except the one crow who's two wings and left foot are captured Somewhere, in seven frames of some unknowing someone's home video. That crow stays unsolid, Barely but remembered in the camera of my eye, like every eyelash I've shed and picked off my cheek and wished upon, wishing nowhere, to a question, whispering in my head because the direction of the wish is so unsure. Like every leaf of grass, shaft of wheat, stalk of corn, wild grass, every individual plant that passed me by at sixty miles an hour, that passed my window and was recorded by the camera of my eye, seen and forgotten, found and lost, the kind of block that builds Familiar. Along the freeway between here and that place in me; all of the since of growing like a bean, awkward and twisted and natural and steady.

          I think I'm moving through a space when the freeway is a place in me, instead of an unimaginable horizon between. When growing is a place that doesn't exist between a child's world and an adult's, but rather a place in each world when the two worlds meet.