Our grandmother hands her a wooden spoon
and instructs her to grind and stir
until they don’t look like berries anymore.
Perhaps I would also grow up
helping to make jam,
perhaps,
or I would grow up to poison myself
in my grandmother’s bathroom, seize and fit,
wooden-spoon rigid, grind and stir in parts of me
until they don’t look like mine anymore.
If I put my mind to it I can cut away until it’s nothing at all.
I can take statistical notations and illegibility for desk graffiti.
I can take seashells from memories of beaches I call make-believe.
I can take gloaming and a scowl for a framed photograph.
I can take strawberries and tangled sheets for headaches.
I don’t know how to be normal.
I am better at being different
but not on purpose, not knowing how to be myself
but I’m getting better
at that too so I take what I can-
when I'm not dragging apathy tracks through the sand-
different and myself don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
I don’t miss somewhere that I've never been
but somewhere that I'll never be.
