At Hawk Mountain there is a ledge called North Lookout that makes an imax theater screen of the sky and removes the ground from beneath you.

The boulders hold you up like a sacrifice to the mouth of crumbling wisdom teeth called The River of Rocks that meanders like broken jaw bone. Gravels chews you up and spits you out like gypsy mouth cocoons and the toothpick arms of newly birth screaming samplings.

When I feel small I think of that place and imagine I’m suspended there.

How even boulders are nothing but incisors gnawing on the edges of a horizon they can never fully consume.

I think about how I’ve only been there four times but I feel like I’ve been there forever. I feel like I was born there and maybe we all were born on a ledge of a mountain. Some mountain.

I think about how in sixth grade I ate cold squishy macaroni cheese for lunch there. I worried about a hole in the inner thigh of my jeans and about how no one else wanted to get close to the ledge.

Yes. I thought about falling. Not about jumping, about falling like a degraded tree– like a leaf– like a breeze– like a page turn– not to die

but to test how small I was.