AN ANYTHING BUT FLESH

I am a car backfiring, a sudden jolt, or perhaps more like a yawn, a slow circle around the important stuff like good grades and listening and I want to be cruel sometimes, but I’m soft with the words I use and on the hips. I am the third drawer of my childhood dresser, where the heavy books like to live. I am Robert Heinlein, C.S. Lewis, a collection of space rocks in a secret stash under my bed. I don’t tell anyone that it’s quartz crystal that I pick carefully from the playground, but that’s what I am. See, I am the freckles on my mother’s skin, every sun beam that traveled across time to kiss her, to want to cling to her, I am robins in the tree next to the porch, calling out and waking everyone up because I cannot keep quiet, and I am the glasses on the bridge of my father’s nose while he does the voices for The Never Ending Story. I am stuffed animals, mostly Raggedy Ann or the teapot on the stove yelling or perhaps it’s just me making that noise. I am impatience, waiting by the door stumbling through seasons and trying to be steady. I am a bumpy ride, wild and perhaps a little frightening except when I’m not. I am the little window in the bathroom in Florence, misty in the early morning the least real thing to touch. I am anything but flesh.

Verity Callahan