The widow can teach you how to safekeep love. The felon can teach you how to breathe free. The girl of color can teach you how to make yourself invisible.
But not me.
I'm too student to be any kind of teacher.
I'm too unplaced,
unperson'd,
unthing'd,
to be any kind of noun.
I love the potential energy of a word with action in it.
Never could I imagine myself a river rock, but I have sunk.
Never could I imagine myself a storm, but I have lit a crinkled sky.
I'm too soft now to be any kind of lightning. To verb to be any kind of knowhow.
I'm momentum without legs or direction or wheels. A motion of forward without a center of stay.
I creak,
and I don't know what to write that isn't steeped in noun, so
