head rests

Leah's head rests on her right shoulder, a lightening lead burden that has, up to recently, housed thoughts of how to change things. Empty thoughts, these, that called her to think about a process rather than proceed. Now, she is re-energized.

***

She has just returned from a dinner where she was the eighth at a long table of eight, and sat next to the birthday girl. Happy to be fully present at the restaurant, Leah was engaged in her surroundings, and now remembers the way her chopsticks crossed each other, leaned against the red inside of her near-empty bowl in a race toward the ceiling. Next to her, at the table corner, Maggie's half-eaten brownie sat, her chair already returned to the next table over, her cheerful shadow snatched so quickly from the wrap-eatery's daily-swept tile floor to find the open pages of a physical geography textbook.

Leah had pulled her knees up to sit cross-legged in the chair, and she sat up, surveying the red and yellow decor around the restaurant, then her forest green pants, the way they gathered at the insides of her knees.

She looked at the friends at her table. The birthday girl, hands in pockets, a quick-witted, comical collar-puller, always up for making a good time; her long-time gals, ever-supportive and ever-giggly; Leah's good friend of years now, a girl whose consciousness Leah happened into by chance and fortune, a girl who listens, appreciates every word, asks about 'that film festival this summer,' and does not need a reminder of who 'my friend Betsy' is; and a guy who always seems to get her references, shared her interests and sly grins, who characteristically draws chuckles when he declares he 'loves his body."

Leah noted the shined table surface in front of her, now littered with small paper plates, covered with brownie crumbs. She focused on the over-sized clear plastic water cup that now floated several extinguished trick-candles. She thought about the drained double-A batteries in her camera in her room.

Around Leah and the bobbing multicolored wax candles, the table burst into laughter as Emily finished sharing an anecdote about her nephew.

Leah chuckled at Emily's remark, and smiled to herself. She soaked in her reality.

Next

Next, to bend my silver spoon
to take off into my wild
to read the relative universe

played 77 keys
seen the tree leaves turn
in turns
south through the Midwest
and soon,

as the world has my nod,
it'll snatch me again
like a tablecloth from under fine China
without much fuss

bound for the sharps and the flats
for the west, and
for the west-becomes-east

for the moon
and the wild, filigreed, bendable
spoon