Seattle 4, or a poemdraft

More travel tales to come soon. Remind me to write about blackberries in Olympia, the Battle of the Ages, the subjonctif, and making friends on the train. In the meantime, this is what came out of writing class on Monday:

Can you imagine anything more scary?
Sure, I can.
When I was ten, I built worlds out of of twigs,
moss and discarded potato chip bags with
Jan Roncevic on the loser side of the field
at recess.

We worked through lunch hour
like we had ant-sized contractors crawling
up our ankles and threatening to bite
if we didn't finish the intergalactic
hollow tree transport network
by the time the late bell rang.

On my breaks, I rolled fruit leather cigarettes
while Jan wrote out the city's constitution
in Morse code,
and I built Hell next to the basketball courts,
out of spruce sap
and icicles, pretended each one
held my grandmother, or my father
and I was only allowed to melt one
with my bare hands.

When the yard teacher caught me
crying without my mittens,
she told us we weren't allowed to talk about Hell,
so I learned to make those choices in silence,
without consultation,
packing frostbite into my fingertips
like remorse.