title:

portrait of a tiny girl facing something so large

that it defies all known words with which to contain it:

or

title: portrait of something so large it is also called tiny girl

see, i am the girl

walking on saturday mornings where the air is still empty like two am

i cross every sidewalk like someone with nothing to lose

in a world where everyone else

has only just started playing the game

title: portrait of tiny girl who walks into oncoming traffic with so much confidence that the man smoking a cigarette on his front porch stoop across the street takes a last breath for her

i see my reflection in passing car windows

a skyline is looking back at me

see, i am the girl

maybe i am this city, too

title: portrait of tiny girl who is also a city

i am the girl and the city

i am looking for a way home

home is not a city

i am a city

i am not a home

nothing inhabitable, no more than a resting place between here or there

here or there

neither is more than a resting place for words with bigger purpose

words with places bound around their ankles, tying them to where their roots once grew

rootless girl

transplant child

when nowhere is tying you down

life is just a long winded walk home

down a street everyone else forgot about

shadowed to a sunlit road

the precipice of something extraordinary

but never quite there

see, i never was quite there

how fitting -

the place my legs take me first

is in the heart of the city

and uninhabitable to anyone with a home

or a heartbeat

title: portrait of tiny girl without a heart who still pumps blood

i think i am most at home with the dead

because at least they are planted somewhere

they do not have to know an life untethered;

time does not exist for them -

and i always feel like i'm running out

title: portrait of tiny girl who realized the song that reminded her of herself

was the song about the dead girl

to put it simply

i am the girl in the city

i am the city

a city is not a home

i am the city whose legs took her to a cemetery instead of a home

maybe they are the same thing

title: portrait of tiny girl following the woman with one foot in the grave

my clothes smell like my grandmother's now

bitter and tobacco stained,

like all the broken promises i made my mother

are living in the fabric

she crawled into bed with me last week

and told me i smelled like smoke

i wondered how she could not see that i have been on fire this whole time