I inventory my body:
my head, shoulders, knees.
It’s all there.
 
As if it all slid back,
just now,
into place.
 
I look up at the sky.
I miss the songbirds,
the shapes our eyes scissored into the clouds,
everything but drones.
 
With a broom, you sweep away
ash, splinters of glass, dolls’ heads
tied to a serpent’s body. I must 
 
return from dreams. I am not done. 
Something still needs me,
loneliness, my longstanding
 
armor, my ingrown faith.
I hide from my body inside
my body, hide from the world
inside the passive voice.
 
I destroyed my life by living it
without me.
 
Now the day is 
hungry, and I must feed it
 
plumes of pollen, shards of
chipped Alice in Wonderland teacups, frames
of family vacations. Wound up 
 
toys and dinner silverware.
Mopped clean, and piled someplace
in my saltatory mind.
 
My mother draws close after conflict, apologetic.
I brush off her touch.
There’s nowhere to put you, she doesn’t say.
The graves are heaped to the brim.
 
I’ll be a magician.
Teach me how to make balloon animals.
My hands want to create penguins,
their bones of air.
Show me how to hold the breath 
 
of the cosmos
in the shape of a jay.
 
I mean the genesis 
of pleasure. I want to prove to you
I can form pleasure.
Fill up a golden balloon 
 
with myself as a foundation 
of daylight. Hold a golden balloon 
with the easy purpose 
 
of becoming antlers.
Alone is a solitary animal 
 
deflating in the corner of the room,
growing smaller.
 
Half-time magic, half-time habit. 
Is this not the way of life?
The exhaust in the flutter
 
of a firefly. I’ll be Cinderella, dust the floor.
A witch says sweet, spring
nothings in the forest. Grocery shopping.
 
I wrap my head in my arms and flee.
It’s not pouring, or too sunny
 
and I’m not scared.
I’ve become accustomed to
running this way.
 
I braid bread, a ton of bread,
one loaf for each neighbor 
and head
to the graveyard.
 
I dream of sleep.
My peers who go on their roads
all return to spend these hours with me.
 
Alone, I sip my coco.
 
The kids go back to school, and find classrooms packed with the displaced. 
The tellers go back to the banks, and find ruins in their wakes.
The neurologists go back to the ward, and find it beset by seizures.
We’re petrified to go back home, and find it
 
gone.
 
The wolves have seen
everything, everything,
go on howling.
I also continue 
to sing.
 
Hundreds of kids on the porch
throwing gifts down on the passersby:
itchy sweaters, satin ballet shoes, dog-
 
eared books, artificial dimples, my mother’s tears.
While the parade, a sea of blood, celebrates the end 
 
of the plague. I shut down the i-
everything, my phone is last,
 
and go to bed.
In my nightmares, magic dies young.
 
My lungs give up ballooning
the breath of the world. The memory
of golden antlers against our lonely palms.
 
Sometimes a blue jay is hard to tell apart
from the sky.

About the author:

Elaine Miriam’s work, featured in  The Stardust Review, The Sacramento Literary Review, The Amsterdam Review, Sky Island Journal and others, has been nominated for the 2025 Best New Poets Anthology, the 2025 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem and won first place for the 2025 Yeats Poetry Prize. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted was a best-seller in four categories on Amazon. 

Feature image by Maria Lupan on Unsplash