In the months after the election, no one can get comfortable in their skin.  This wolfish thing inside me scratches at the door each night and howls.  Growls at cab drivers and racist cousins in Oklahoma.  Makes friends with any window I can climb out of.  Anything that can get its hooks into my hair.  When I was a kid, I kept getting tangled in the blackberry bush in the yard, scratches on my thighs, my arms, my hemline reddening with juice. Even my fingers sticky for full-on fever, that twinning under some July moon.  I’d love to say I don’t hate men, but sometimes it’s hard.  Each one before you, grooves in the same record—the ones with ex-wives and el caminos and whiskey in their voices.  I’d love to say I loved them, but really, I was game for anything that could swallow me whole in one bite.

It’s summer, and on the news, men continue to do horrible things to women. I am writing poems and eating cherries til my lips stain.  Afflicted with the kind of lonely that hollows out the lungs.  Makes the body hospitable to ghosts and paper boats floating the surface of some still pond.  My hand is another girl’s hand. My heart is another girl’s blind panic. Her father the kind with too many sons and not enough daughters.  Another girl’s name on my t-shirt, bloody beside the tracks.  Another girls broken clarinet in a storm drain. How all of this fills a space we did not know existed, much less that it was large enough for a drowning. And worse, that I could make a harbor here, take my slice of cake and spread out a blanket beneath it.  What is, in fact, the weight of love?  Heavier than a heart?  Heavier than the hand?  By now I should be waving goodbye.  But my palm catches the wind like a sail.