Before she had hips,
the world was already
rolling away from her.
By the time she was fifteen
the soles of her feet were
worn as her grandmother’s hands,
cracked into minuscule maps
of paths she shouldn’t have known.
The shelves were not yet
draped in dust.
She reached out her fingers
in a years long vapor
of deciphering the lands
on her skin.
She followed the sky just to
see where it went,
eyeless in a rain storm
was no different than here.
Breathless from the
chasing
she’d grown old as the
earth.
Grasping at stones
she lay in the grass,
scouring nonsensical
geography
from her feet.
Unable to stand
she sunk
knees and elbows
into the damp beneath her.
The wind paused to
dress her and
for a moment, the earth was still.
Nicole Marie