to rest on concrete.

for the kid holding a hand-painted poster that said “if I die in a school shooting drop my body on the steps of the CDC” ​ She will reach into the crevices of her eyes, extract pearls from oysters, and blow them from her fingertips like dandelion heads. The wind will mistake them for seeds. Sleep will become something that is planted in the late April grass and grows annually like the lull that comes after Easter is over. ​ She will wait to shave her legs until the last possible minute, cradle calf over bathtub, and sing “Sunday Bloody Sunday” because she is never as careful as she thinks she is. ​ She will leave in the morning and forget to close the garage door behind her. She will circle back, walk along the cut-through streets to make sure she left things as they should be. No one will circle back to make sure she is left as she should be. ​ She will fall asleep in public three times before 9:00 a.m. She will imagine the bus commuters as ants each carrying pieces of fruit larger than their bodies. She can see the way their shoulders are sinking. She will wish to double grocery bag their troubles and chuck them out the bus window.

She will think that public transportation is a collection of people who are airing their dirty laundry out the open windows. Who are not too bashful to apologize for taking up space. She will think of the woman in the wheelchair with an orange silk scarf as a monument. The fabric as lady liberty’s torch. She will wonder when the fire burned out. ​ She will ask herself if she is fiction or nonfiction. She will never truly know. She will not get to decide for herself what is real and what is not. She will have it decided for her; will walk into brick buildings and sit in plastic chairs and learn not to question if she will get to walk back out. ​ She will jut her chin. She will practice for when she is in the world. She will have a poker-face and listen to her heels click on the sidewalk. She will see her face reflected in the stained-glass windows of the cathedral. She will put her faith in the public education system the way old people reach their hands up in church: assured and inhabited by a certainty of afterlife. ​ She will miss the last step on the capitol building stairs. She will view everything that feeds luck as a symbol of retribution to her anger. She will view everything that defies it as a spell cast by those who wish to find her body dead on the linoleum floor. ​ There will be no wake-up call. Seeds will be planted and plucked and cursed out of luck and will not quite make it to May. She will not rise three days later. She will not become a monument. And her absence will be as loud as it is invisible; fleeting with no object permanence. This will happen again. We will forget again. We will wake up in April and much too quickly go back to sleep. ​ People will not be seen as insects. Oysters will not reach their time to harvest. There will be no one to recycle the grocery bags layered on her living room floor. They will not be cut up and woven into blankets. A softer place to land will not exist. The world will revolve around the woodwork underneath. She will not see the earth transform. Wood. Paper. Dust. Rain. Evaporation. Wind. Seedling. Tree. ​ We will not sing “Sunday Bloody Sunday”. The church choir will not sing at all.