twist tie 

we save the twist ties from
the bread to make a ladder to the moon.
they say the moon is made of cheese
but i know it to be a melon. honeydew. 
there's sweet flesh inside that, when you decompose,
a horse comes to feed you. i do not know
how to process the world falling apart. 
i have begun to question though if it was
ever together in the first place. there are
holes dug in the earth where children have dug
for weddings. as a child once i was a ring bearer 
or was i a flower girl? history is hard to make sense of
because what persists is not the facts but 
the emotions. i think when i was a child
that someone put me on a butcher table
& marked my body like a cow. the dotted lines 
like skipped stones in a valley of teeth. 
i saw a meme today that said,
"when i hear people say fall, i don't think
of autumn anymore." there used to be a fountain
where i played as a child. we went barefoot
& once a high school boyfriend spelled
"i love you" with the rocks. there are not
enough opportunities to be sickly sweet.
there are too many runaway trains. 
i catch one. i have nothing but a bag full of
twist ties. i have a dream of making
a house from them. weaving the plastic & metal
into something breathing & holy. 
a monster maybe. a creature with a hunger
as sharp as mine. i would sleep inside the beast.
let its lungs press against me. 
until then. i collect the ties in a little drawer.
measure our days in loaves of bread. 
the bread knife with teeth like an alligator gar,
takes me home. tells me to stop coveting the moon. 
we are not gone yet.