rebegin.

wind up toys mimic ballroom dancers/ swaying into the arms of lovers that they will later/ take for granted/ leave shoes behind/ and run barefoot/ on blackened callous/ flipping through street names like storybook pages/ going back because you forgot what you just read/ and can’t seem to retain/ hold captive/ let me pay ransom to clutch onto the good parts of us/ I am flailing into the arms of strangers/ hoping they will have the decency to care for a girl who’s forgotten her own name/ but remembers how to waltz/ how to rewind and/ reach inside her own ear and hear the churn of the vhs tape/ to always depend on the sound of things to determine if they are good enough.

to hate the sound of her own voice/ to not recognize it on interview audio transcriptions/ to hear instead the scraping of blades on the ice/ to remember how J taught her how to skate/ to remember her mother crying when she found out that he used to drive his daughter and I to pepsi ice while drunk/ and blaming herself because/ no one ever taught us what the word drunk meant before it was too late

we just thought he was happy/ and that when he revved the engine a little too hard/ it was just because he liked the sound it made/ that he liked playing truth or dare with the red lights/ that he would do u-turns where u-turns weren’t meant to be done/ to teach us what it meant to retreat/ to circle back/ to foreshadow/ to forget where you emerged and get so lost in yourself that you forget there are/ two girls in the backseat/ that when you shut a car door/ it should serve as an announcement that you are here/ slam it as exclamation

let him tie your skates so tight that your toes lose feeling/ let him drag you both/ a girl clinging to each arm/ as he would attempt to sprint/ take to the ice so fast that you forget that life doesn’t exist in fast forward/ he would hurl himself forward/ pulling the two of us like clumsy suitcases/ and propel this manmade unit into the blank space/ let us go and watched as we went by/ flying/ sailing/ shrieking as we learned the hard way how to turn so that we wouldn’t end up crashing

how we would ask to do it again/ to restart/ to unravel/ to wind up/ to get caught up in

rebeginning/ so that the release would come again and again/ where we felt relieved from the weight of our coats/ and the stones hidden in their pockets/ until we were left in tank tops/ freezing and freeing ourselves/ becoming