Inside Outside Stephanie

I made myself. Mommy and Daddy were proud, in that order.

I didn’t mail myself like a letter some other kids

already knew. I learned to use stamps. They stuck to my thumb

without any glue. I didn’t have any permission.

There was a snowstorm that lasted three days

and a cavern of monochrome memory. There were board games, and a

pencil-and-paper game

where the object was to figure out the object of the game.

There was a stack of broad-rule writing paper, and a stapled calendar,

and a 64-pack of sparkly rainbow crayons, to make each week look different

since they all started out black and white, and all the same.

O grapefruit (as color and flavor). O never quite rightly tied laces. O look,

up there on the uneven climbing bars,

too hot to touch where the sun touches, now that it’s spring,

the shadow of a tarp, like a sail between sailors

and thin swings that make no decision, like weathervanes.

O think of the lost Chuck Taylors. The lost Mary Janes.