Exile from the Goldenrod Field (Taylor McCleery Sloey-Lafayette, LA)

It’s time to start working on your skin again
You think
You’ve been finding blemishes 
After long nights of self reflection
And it hurts

They’ve packed up your prairie solace
Into a storage unit 
While you were off chasing your dreams
The ones you talked of incessantly with your old mulberry tree
How insensitive that must have been, you now think

Those roots had always supported you and your dreams
Right up until the point you ripped them from your feet to sink barestock into a swamp
But now, they’ve disappeared, and you won’t get to say goodbye.
Objects, land, and photos 
Feel more like dead grandparents you weren’t brave enough to go see at the hospital.

Yes. Mom and Dad are retiring and moving to Denver, Colorado.

Not something an adult woman should be crying about
Yet here you are
Tearing up as you walk to your car on a southern spring night
Because the sky has turned the right color 
and the birds sing the right song
but it doesn’t smell the way your salt marsh grassland did
and you realize you will never have that moment again so long as you live
and it hurts
You will never get to go home again 
And that hurts.

And you knew driving by that summer would be a bad idea.
You’re about 50 meters into the back yard when a lover’s voice calls
“Taylor what are you doing?  You don’t live here anymore”
“I was checking to see how the garden looked…”
You stop, heart sunk, and process the words
 ‘you don’t live here anymore’…

This place saw your first steps
First words
First love
First solo ride on a two wheel bike
Here your fingers discovered the catharsis of 88 keys
and spent countless hours holding the flashlight as dad worked on engines
And now you’re trespassing?

Do the new owners even know there’s a pink butterfly sticker stuck to the underside of an upstairs floor vent that you put there when you were 10?

Jellyfish, sparrows, dandelion seeds…
Some of the most beautiful things spend their lives hovering

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