in beautiful revolt

You’ve shoved your diaries to the backs of basement shelves, balling up  mosquito nets of unrequited unions and shape-shifted hope. Your life is a landfill of regrettable and longed-for stories, edges bitten and molded. You are a knobby constellation of inelegant and heavy casualties, and it is so hard to un-remember that litter in your wake, hard to hold loss as it were cotton candy, a sweet lick of innocence. It is impossible, that kind of amnesia. But maybe you can unspool just enough, retrieve five minutes of fresh time, imagine a container made simply of emptiness. Maybe you can evaporate your mind for the span of fifty breaths, and let that girl come back, the one still itchy with dreaming. Maybe you can watch her sit down to a clean canvas, cleave herself from the small distractions of the room. The windows, even, opening to a summer view or the dog barking at passersby or a teetering pile of broken toys. Maybe you'll catch the impudent way she buffaloes through the acrylics, shunning the brushes entirely, or notice the smash of her fingertips against those portholes of paint, the groove of flesh and fearlessness, and see how the collisions ensue: yellow tumbling into black, red blustering into red, the psychedelic metamorphosis of purple. Maybe you will recognize the splatter she makes, expunging the canvas of its purity, blaspheming every millimeter, and understand the thousand new colors erupting in beautiful revolt. And maybe you’ll follow the girl as she leans back, cheeks warm from the flurry, to survey her handiwork, and see the mess for what it is: her name, spelling itself over and over in a sea of forgiveness.