skater boy sighs so loudly I can hear it // kyra jee
from clear across the street. as for me, i am getting
used to calling myself insane—it makes it
easier, actually being insane: like looking down seeing
the hole in the boat, a live salmon sticking
its notorious head into the crack before switching back
into the river, & myself realizing: oh that’s
why my ankles are wet. it’s not good
news; but if we waited to tell each other good things
then we’d never learn anything about anyone.
these days i am fuchsia with june
delusion, & only sometimes feeling
like a person. right after dinner
is usually ok, after the weather
has put itself away again. ever since it
happened, the stars have started to list & slide. jupiter’s
sprawling, saturn is spinning out—& don’t even
get me started on mars. or maybe it’s just the heat
of summer, lewd & docile in turns, that makes me
feel like less of a person. a person’s got to
work at that, i guess. so i do. on my list of things
to do this week, i have: mount the portrait
of edgar over the mantle; phone a new
dentist; figure out how cheetahs differ
from jaguars; make brownies. list
the good things that happened today.
here’s one:
after our friend comes back
from the future, the three of us sit by the pool,
surrounded on many sides by doors.
watching the new fence get put in,
as if the HOA isn’t leaving that gate open
ten hours a day just to get around the construction.
hey skater boy, what kind of sigh was that? i think
we might’ve had a few good things to say
to each other. for example, one thing i learned
this summer is that if you just stay put long
enough to count the calls of three or four
local birds in one go—sit on hot concrete with your
knees up & pluck out a pattern or two from the deluge
of war-cries & weather reports—that good feeling, it
probably won’t last all day; it’s not very durable.
but
so long as you’re sitting there, it is
a good feeling. warm, usually. unambitious,
dozing. & if you ever wanted to,
you could even be a bird yourself!
you see, it doesn’t matter how insane a bird is,
or if it does not feel very much like a bird today.
there is very little anyone can do
to make a bird stop being a bird. to make a bird
feel like less
of a bird.
Kyra Jee is a Chinese-American poet from California. Her work has been published in Orion's Belt; Harbor Review; Scribendi, for which it received the Western Regional Honors Council Award for Poetry; The Allegheny Review; and elsewhere. One of the greatest writerly decisions she has ever made (so far, at least) was serving on the editorial board of a lit mag—she hopes to do so again someday.