Caroline Picker

You were born for this

Tomorrow was a barbeque. Tomorrow was your birth. We were in the pool playing volleyball when you emerged, slick with recent closeness to the stars. You tell yourself your luck is not because of your ancestors but in spite of them. If you don’t stick the landing, you may never walk again, but also snowflakes, honeycomb, the discipline of the mosquito, and ultimately, of blood. Time is a jellyfish and we become mites on feathers, then electrons, then free, the stuff of myth and knowing. You climb. The global supply chain trucks on, a bee makes ragged circles through your head. From the crowd, a lone tooth gapped whistle rings out to make sure you know you are beloved. Whatever your mistakes, your false assessments, the harm you caused and did not repair, whatever it is that filled you up with helium and made you too thick skinned for any pin, the psychics predicted this: you, rising and rising and rising.

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Caroline Picker (she/her) is a queer parent, poet, and movement worker striving for collective liberation in Southern Vermont on Abenaki land. Her writing has appeared in Ballast Journal, Subnivean, West Trade Review, Pensive, and Literary Mama, among other publications.