Life In Child's Pose

As a girl, you tore bark from trees like a bear
already too late to know who hurt you,
the heart like a dandelion you cracked the stem of and folded
on the playground watching other girls play.

You wondered what it was to be them—
skinned knees and jumping jacks,
clean hair whispering to the grass.

Forced yourself to hold hands for Red Rover,
forming an unmined anger,
a hole you didn’t understand
until it lit up gold, and you wrote a bible
which began, I had to draw to save myself.

And ended, Talk most to innocence,
where we play our own gods awhile,

where we pray to be relieved,
where we pray

to trust touch.

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Christina Seymour is the author of When is a Burning Tree (Glass Lyre Press 2018) and the chapbook Flowers Around Your Soft Throat (Structo 2016). Her poems also appear in The Moth, North American Review, Cimarron Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Wick Poetry Center’s exhibit, Speak Peace—American Voices Respond to Vietnamese Children’s Paintings, and elsewhere. Her work received the Russell MacDonald Creative Writing Award and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and the AWP Intro Award.