Everything that happens to me I feel it more

by Isabelle Doyle

I wake up full of birds. A teenage feeling.

Off-balance and fluttering. Clouded-yellow

-yellow sky breaks into pieces like a fresco,

little white stars everywhere. I wonder

about the barber and how his hand felt

cupping the back of my skull, about the blades

of his scissors, the crows and their grudges,

shorn locks loosed and sent floating off into

hallucinatory unshorn afternoon of green and yellow.

My heart smearing. A teenage feeling. It might be

summer everywhere all year, and I take a shine to him

like a giant mirror on the floor of the ocean

reflecting the sunlight back to itself. I take

a shine to him, which means I get really shiny

whenever he’s around. Like an ice floe, I become

my category by means of drifting towards.

I dream my head tucked into a vague neck

and all that morning I have a teenage feeling.

Whenever I fall in love I’m like a cantaloupe

who falls in love with someone really bad for her.

Whenever I make breakfast I must look

just like a girl who is making breakfast.

I make pour-over coffee and scald me,

a meteoroid in the outer space of my attention—

like a telescope, I become my category by means

of closing in: the interval between me and my body

is like the distance between a character

and an actress, a season between the seasons.