THE NEW MIDWEST
Death is long. It grows. I measure my death's shadow against the doorframe give it a pencil tick for each flash of grim the world writes. My parents tried. They gave me a room with a lock on the outside, a mirror on the wall. I want to say never about a lot of things. I want to say better. I watch an orca beach herself at SeaWorld and feel the violet waters of the sound contracting in me, my death growing. it's not my death's fault that for every cage something is caged. That boys will be bad meat, and girls thrown behind dumpsters. I'm afraid by the time I make a life my death will be the new Midwest, like the forever of Kansas, where there are roadside lookouts you can climb but the only thing to see are other looksouts and all the death between them and the death before that, knowing you must somehow make room for life.













