For pigtails, balance beams, cracks to break your mother’s back. Everything, lines.
I wrote loops, not over and over but forward and forward and
my line was a graphite bow, a graphite flight performing an air show, a telephone cord to
stories and signatures, a sideways gallop.
Put a word in. Even bird. Not even a kind of bird.
I would write that bird to be a lace bird a paltry bird a saffron sparkle word bird.
That year all the words would fall into my lines.
Even chair for you to sit down while my line kept going.
I would learn cursive and go.
I was a dot in Minnesota on I-90. I had learned about the west and the east.
A ray is a dot with a line leaving it that never ends.
This young thing wants to pirouette on the power lines.
This young thing says his thoughts are kite string.
I am putting children in all of my lines—
I have a tightrope to skim above the sea. An assembly line of square cheese. Language meet lines. Lines meet language. Those Cy Twombly chalk squiggles. Knots of excuses. Flâneur through garbage. A stomp to the bus.
Children, fall into me. Make breasts, silhouettes. I’ve been writing lines all of this time.
[spacer height=”20px”] Click here to read Carrie Oeding on the origin of the poem.
Photo ” Blackboard” by Bjørn Egil Johansen; licensed under CC BY 2.0
