Elise Partridge

Childhood You came into this world trailing clouds all right, they just happened to be big black ones. In the castle you drank from a poisoned goblet and were changed into something even bears cringe at. When you awake baling-wired in thorns, viceroys around you cobwebbed to their steins, moth-eaten ermines, a muttering king— what choice do you have? Rappel down the turret with your cap and bells. Adolescence Handed a baton in a bad-luck relay, you've overshot the cliff and are pinwheeling down, flailing in time to that whistling-wind keening that lets viewers know you will soon be compressed under a subsequent sequence of rocks. Squashed into pleats a centimeter wide? Stride till you're 3-D again. Adulthood You're staggering through a dark wood, soundtrack a fugue. Remember wrens risk a hand for a single seed, orchids can sprout from duff alone. Executive Summary How many can you feed from your sourdough lumps? Each morning, braid a loaf. Give them away.

Remember after work you grabbed our skateboard, crouched like a surfer, wingtips over the edge; wheels clacketing down the pocked macadam, you veered almost straight into the neighbor's hedge? We ran after you laughing, shouting, Wait! Or that August night you swept us to the fair? The tallest person boarding the Ferris wheel, you rocked our car right when we hit the apex above the winking midway, to make us squeal. Next we raced you to the games, shouting, Wait! At your funeral, relatives and neighbors, shaking our hands, said, "So young to have died!" But we've dreamt you're just skating streets away, striding the fairgrounds toward a wilder ride. And we're still straggling behind, shouting,Wait—!

Where is the word I want? Groping in the thicket, about to pinch the dangling berry, my fingerpads close on air. I can hear it scrabbling like a squirrel on the oak's far side. Word, please send over this black stretch of ocean your singular flare, blaze your topaz in the mind's blank. I could always pull the gift from the lucky-dip barrel, scoop the right jewel from my dragon's trove.... Now I flail, the wrong item creaks up on the mental dumbwaiter. No use— it's turning out of sight, a bicycle down a Venetian alley— I clatter after, only to find gondolas bobbing in sunny silence, a pigeon mumbling something I just can't catch.