Acrid and lonely, little girl,

running down one street and up another

toes like crow wings, beetle juice, and charcoal

framed in the sun, hiding from the children

in weeds and bushes, your eyes

follow the streams of spit bubbles

and trash floating down the river’s

bright and glistening muck, sun disguising

its depths, and fingers of currents like

lullabies in your bones,

your bones of ripe fruit.

The pollen and sticky bees

that crowded your life’s little bud

sting like summer’s shock of cold hose water

on sunburned skin, but you stand still

and laugh at nothing, your laugh

a well of strangeness.

Acrid and lonely, little girl,

the stars that formed you

splintered into rain-ripped sheets of light,

like a few thorns in the baby evergreen,

and sometimes, looking into you,

all the world was Andromeda,

Venus, Orion, Pleiades.

Look over the shoulder of time—

you’re here as a guest, six, a nose-picker,

seated in children’s church for badges

and making little mud pies

with your dark and understanding words,

like a curtain pulled across the angry neighbors’ window.

A summer’s day is too hot to throw rocks,

sell love and chicken-hearts, lick cotton candy,

and throw tiny firecrackers everywhere

in explosions of powdery paper

like the sunflower seed shells,

salted from your lips, a trail on the sidewalk,

where we dream of our birthday parties at dusk,

scrawny, scraggly little girls;

scratchy porch steps and stinging eyes,

thinking of sex and rain and baby dolls

with a peculiar hunger

while boxes of Cheerios rest

on the screaming, fighting, neighbors’ porch.

Acrid and lonely, little girl,

sad and crazy forever,

formed by the nothingness of life

 into a small orange—

flesh and peel, cool and round,

and all promises caught in that

crooked-smiling slice of time—

dark bees of twilight,

broken rope-skipping

splashes of hair, feet bare

and careless,

like a river that dips its feet in you and me

as we flow—slow, slow,

and reach for the sea.