Exposed

See the skeleton through the wings?

It’s hollow

Full of air

Os and COs

1s and 2s

Fanning out the membranes:

Glowing furry windows

Filtering streetlights, night’s lights

Murky with pigment, veins

Bony crosses framing leather panes

Cruising Zephyr’s highway

Membrane turned outside in

Cupped upward like a woman

Dark and warm

For once not pummeled

By elements

The Os and COs

The Hs

The 2s

Pepper the virgin lining

Instead

Whipping past a frenzied head

Scampering, teetering

Trying not to scatter to the ends

On Zephyr’s bends

The 2 membranes teeter

totter

See how she flies blind?

Dark and listening

For once not pummeled

By elementary

Ohs and ahhs

Exclamations—shrieks

Surprise at being

Naked as a baby

Blind as a bat

Free as a word

The Tiny Girl and the Sea

(with props to Ernest Hemingway)

rough-hewn umbilical cord

monstrous, natural

swinging and whipping

if not for its baby ballast:

tiny me

gasping

hand over hand

fibers and pores

shrunken, like Alice,

on nerve’s last, soggy straw

I trail through the void

skirts flapping

hair snapping

hard against my

tear-stained

wind-burnt

doe-eyed

face

pulled along the water—above

but not out of trouble

for the sea raged

the fish leapt

and I hung

and I swung,

hands gripping

rope burning

sweaty slipping

it’s dark and I’m

lost at speeds

o’er seas, endless seas

stop the storm

and drop my form

and walk me Home

Home Home

walk with me

on water, endless water

endlessly Home, Home, Home