There are lost people here. Sometimes we sit on the pavement, arms around our knees, and stare out at nothing. Sometimes we're trying to think, or realize we haven't thought so well in a long tie. We walk barefoot over the perfectly mown grass and look up at the straggling dearth of leaves in the trees. A bag beside us, we sit outside, cold, but more awake than we've been in a while. We wish someone might come across us, ask us. Go for a walk and think and talk- about what, we aren't sure. We want to feel alive again, like we did that day with the wind in our hair and the smell of the sea all around us. Unbeknowst to us, from a window, someone sees. They turn away, they almost come down to speak. When they look back again,we have disappeared.

I remember the first time I read cummings- or perhaps not the first time, but the first time I remember, it was music class. We girls, a chorus of misfit divas and shy women about to become great. We were not a whole, not a community, but all of us crowded around in the two minutes before class to bend our heads and read the papers stashed, secreted away under our plastic chairs we sang the choir songs, of Iesu, the songs of Cabaret, but in my head I only sang in broken phrases waiting under plastic chairs a chair that wasn't mine, I'd only had a glimpse of words, haphazardly printed all on two sides of one somewhat crumpled page, no seeming structure, beautiful thought as thoughts come poetry. That's how I fell in love.

Grapefruit

A grapefruit, even perpetually unopened, is so much more than a round thing, a ball. Though I toss it in the air, when I hold it in my hand, I hold so much potential, so much life. The fruit is a living item, cool from the windowsill, holding a sense of self completely apart from my own. I hold it cupped in my hands and feel another being, something I cannot bear to break, something whole. While it sits in my windowsill, I cannot help but regard it. I respect it, the grapefruit. It fills me with a sort of mottled joy, the shaded, speckled skin uneven, scarred, blushing in parts. The odor is slight, but the effect profound. The skin, the acetic oils shine in the lamplight. Something that I cannot understand endears me greatly to this grapefruit, which sits so cold, so smug, so clearly at peace.

How do we make a difference? Amnesty International is on the corner; Change.org emails me every day. New pieces of the universe are being discovered, slowly worked out in laboratories around the world. But I only touch the little pieces of the world around me, am touched in return by the little world I live in- a new friend from the office made cookies today; my friend got a dog and it makes her happy again. What matters?

I think perhaps I've grown shallower as I have aged. My words came so quickly, once. Aged, of course, is wrong- my self-conscious writing corrects: At twenty-one, my youth is all around me. But aged, too, in a way: not seven, not seventeen. Perhaps the words are gone because the woods are taken out of me: I walk for hours, but for hours dead leaves decompose underfoot Down paved-over suburban lanes- The little forest pockets are sad, somehow Or frightening. So much is hidden, and even if I dig None of the leaves turn to needles, and I am not in my heart's home. Even as I write this, I sit: On the fourth floor My whitewashed walls around me My window open: this, at least, I will not concede. Not even on the coldest days. But even then, I'm lacking thought. I seek the clarity that once I found so easily- That once I couldn't cause to leave me alone To let me sleep. I run and try to think, to get my head out of myself Out of the self-indulgent rituals I've allowed Of waiting Of staying warm Of eating when I am hungry Not letting myself suffer until the clarity appears. My greatest fear is that I will remain indulgent self: Grow older, maybe "wiser" (shudder), take a job on the wrong coast for the wrong rent -rent itself, once so abhorrent in my mind- to chase a lack of dream down the sky. Perhaps there's still a chance. I have to stay present. I cannot let the anodynes of life suck me dry.