Delete Instagram Where Are Your Grass Stains

I think wellness is being unforgiving and a bit of a bitch and not just holding your ground but also scooping it up and cradling it in a cool sparse room of just you and you and the you to come.

I think wellness is money which is blunt and not poetic in the slightest but I think wellness is finding the poetry in everything and there is no poetry in poverty.

I think wellness does not belong only to me and so I don’t go home as often as I should when I’m tired. I don’t want my mother to worry.

I don’t think I’ve met me yet is what I thought 3 years ago and I was half right (half wrong)

Except I was completely right because even the right-wrong is wrong-wrong when met with the wrong-right (the new)

I’ve met me there is no time nor place I am Schrodinger’s [ ________ ]

Empty spaces are not empty when in wait

by Huda Shulaiba

Two boys who are boys in the way only boys can be. Your neighbor’s wind chimes on a partly cloudy June day when the breeze carries you over to wave to Mr. Jerome call me uncle Jerry the dollar store man who gives you an orange push pop and red hot barbecue Better Made chips because you only turn 6 and 23 days old once. Carrying fourteen worms to safety and throwing firefly funerals and inhabiting a world clearly meant for roly-polies and very little else. When water is turquoise NOT blue. Flipping off the cabinet wall under the kitchen counter. Crying when you break your arm even though everyone says you’re overreacting because you know when to recognize it hurts. The plush piggy bank valiantly won at a Chuck E. Cheese makes you think you won’t ever need the rubber-banded stack at the top of mama’s closet shelf. Your journal says dear diary the corn stalks in Ohio and driving along the edge of the Appalachian which is maybe why you developed that fear of heights in the first place.

upon reading the dictionary the summer before entering the fourth grade you learn that sometimes definitions double as direction. WELLNESS/TO BE WELL: enjoying the wait and knowing when there’s nothing to wait for.