Pause, and capture me how I am now:
wrap me up in the minute we just lived:

make me your mosquito in amber –
ephemeral in life, eternal in death.

Freeze and pin me to your little brother’s trifold –
turn me into grade-school, spelling-test vocab:

Today I am taking down my closet doors.
With my Dad’s old screwdriver, a little elbow grease,
And the sweat that will drip from my pores,
I will welcome the old me to the new one.

A Prodigal daughter never returns home
She may enter its walls after her respite,
but is always a guest
to the ghost of her mother’s daughter

What if the tides bent out from the shore;
Waves broke from themselves, curling out
and up, scraping the sky,
rolling back.
They would collide into each other in the middle of the sea
and then fall, plunge
into some slit of darkness, of magma