“there are too many poems about
the loss of innocence,” she smirked,
reaching in the junk drawer
and pulling out a white crayon,
“and too many that rhyme.”
that night she dreamt
of silver teardrops escaping
translucent eyelids
and floating like hot air balloons
to join their brothers and sisters in the sky.
and when she woke,
she found the clock still stuck on
11:18, and the white crayon
melting under the desk lamp.

with a yellow no. 2 pencil
she slowly traced her hand,
smudging its gentle curves with
a chewed-up eraser.
“when my temple moved
from stained glass window to office building,”
she wrote, “my religion did not follow.”
and with the remaining pink crumbs
she faded her words into ashy clouds,
as if the whispering soul songs
she was brave enough to sing,
just for that moment,
were purple sin.

in her daydreams she saw God,
but not the way the prophets did.
He appeared to her in the way the sea
kissed the shoreline
and when her teacher told her
to write a poem, she cried because
her first thought wasn’t
to write about Him.
she so desperately wanted
to write of star tears
and fingertips smudged with purple sin
and white crayons melting under desk lamps.
so with the clock stuck on 11:18
and mountains of crumbled-up hand silhouettes,
that’s what she did.