It’s February and the trees are bare.
You love the northeast but you feel like the ground
knows you here. Everything is the color of a bad dream you had once. Your mouth
tastes like bile. Your boots are salt-stained and your favorite jeans have bitter mud on
the hems. The sun is setting later and the light flattens everything into
coming home to an empty house. You are a frame and nothing else;
you’ve become hollow in this light. Outside your mother’s house the coyotes bark like
laughing children. You are sorry to everyone you’ve hurt.
You put your hand to the television screen but you can’t feel the static.
What you say is, you want your mother.
What you mean is, you want to be small again.