Talk Vomit

By A.J. Parker

You live on a grid but never know lines. You know only snow cone Fridays and spirit  days. You sweat sugar and sweettalk jackrabbits, like hop hop, let’s hop away from here, and  when the radio is on, it’s the same three songs, but you swing so high, the city is all yours. 

Until you’re silenced in the back of the classroom, art chastised because the kiln didn’t  quite crack it all the way, but you still have to pick up the pieces. You come home and it’s worse,  moldy ceilings singing rot, rot, let’s rot away from here. The horses agree not to bite off your  fingers because you already did it for them, but the empty fridges are all yours. 

That perfect grid system locks you in a circle, and the news talks about the Romeo-Juliet  murder-suicide at a neighboring high school while your class hides with the door locked. Weeks  later, someone breaks into the computer lab through the skylight like crash, crash, let’s crash  away from here. You dream of pendulums and mountaintops, but the pain doesn’t go away when  you go to the mall, it just staples you with security tags and says, “all yours.” 

In the summer, you love lemonade and burning as your friends tell you where to light the  fire. You sit on the roof and watch the desert sun weep orange from up high, like climb, climb,  let’s climb away from here, but you were never clever enough to not be loud about it. So you  become a cliché – a woodpecker perched on a prickly pear screaming for some respite in the  endless drought that’s become all yours. 

You learn parallel lines are all you’ll ever be as you carve sad words into bathroom stalls,  forced to grow up by busy roads, other’s secrets becoming yours, and the murder-suicide down  the street that took a Girl Scout, but this is suburban living, after all. This is what you get in any  city you’re in: the undeniable pressure of creaky doors, stoplights, and mourning doves wailing  at the crack of dawn fly, fly, fly, fly far away from here until it’s no longer all yours.