Juicy berries, fresh cut stems, warm sap—tingle or jar, and sometimes neither, and sometimes nothing but make it ugly just to prove you can. How many times can you read an interpretation of a perfume, opposite thoughts and very strong opinions, before you understand how it smells. The same way you can listen to their account of what happened: the birth, sweet or violent, and then hear tales of their adolescence squeezed dry or ripening, the way they talk about you. The way some say the stars twinkle, while others shoot, never look up and realize they are made of the same thing. There is no such thing as real when everything is.

Hot air ballooning to new heights: shimmer dust sparkle plum cotton candy everything nice. Make a wish and make sure the first one is to land in the right place somewhere between future and past, and no definitely not now. Clue: sometimes the what-once-was and the someday-will-be happen at the same time and place. There are other dimensions coloured by the slant of your paint.

Try to turn the sun into a lump, you can’t. It’s wrapped around the sky, wrapped around what appears to be a pale blue dot, pierced by light. A skewer of chaos finally cooling down after all this time, relic of blue order from the formerly violent night. Every day’s a little bit shorter, wind a notch stronger, wings beating a little harder to maintain an airborne demeanour, but you don’t notice. Your shoulders drop because it doesn’t matter what the difference between light and shadow is, as long as there is one.

You are a monster thirsting for art and banana milk and plush ecstatic. Trying to be softer, but the only place that comes naturally is in the dark where there is no one there to see. The dark is a time not a place. In the light, you shine like a princess. The monster compresses into a pea, and you sleep on it. 

It’s the season of fire and everyone is out for glory. The membrane between what you have and what you want is distinct; you have to swing mighty to get anywhere. You think you’re different, evolved, but this is still a battle fought with lives, except this time you don’t even get any cardio in. When the forest is done burning, profit margins are the only thing to come out clean. And when you lose your motive and the heat has risen to the top, carried your dreams with it, the place your body still recognizes is not home, but a garden. The tree does not make a sound. 

Panic and prayer, grief and glitter: everything in a skin held tight and compact so nothing escapes beyond a two feet radius, so no one can see how big you really are. Five feet five, weighing less than a you-shaped bucket of stars—it’s a miracle. Now you've got mountains to climb and sunsets to see off, but the clouds hang low and the sky is more orange than blue. First it was nothing and soon it is neither. You will have many more feelings and words for it this time around. For everything.

Time is stuck inside a glacier, and thus is prone only to sending subliminal messages, either warning or invitation. You might as well be floating, but it’s still cold when there are no seconds to watch. And damn it, without a way to measure life you still have nerves and gravity. So you plunge. You plunge into a bright and forgiving emptiness. And at the shore, the flowers have no temperature but the fields they make are warm and lovely. 

A pink petal falls from the skies, a lottery helping you orient your beliefs toward your body. You’ve never met a whole flower, can’t even comprehend the shape, or the use. Below there is a constellation of roots making them every June. In this skin, the petal is your moon. It’s too early for stars.