RUUT DEMEO

In my storage room, there’s a girl.

She speaks in diary and sings in 

compact discs. Her radio is the blue 

plastic bin that she is in. No speaker, airwave, just dust and cinderblock.

 

Occasionally I visit her, turn on

the energy saving lightbulb and

marvel at the mess of us that

bulges from beneath lids, and hangs down from the shelves.

 

I am her. She is me. But our

veins pump something different, our

lungs breathe dust, only hers in 

bowls and mine in particles. I can leave anytime.

 

I want to set her free, to show her

how outside the storage room walls 

some old roots crawl against them, trees

die, ripples of fungus eat their trunks, and it’s beautiful.

 

But she is made of plastic, twisted

rigid, her expression caught just so, 

printed in stagnant font, the color of dried

blood from alive-times. She’s a hollow pistol brimming with readiness. 

 

Nothing loaded.

 

I have buried her many times on 

the bottom shelf, then moved her 

up a level, she shifts like that but never

joins us upstairs in the kitchen, where real music

floods us from the Cape Cod yard-sale radio and

 

makes us dance around while we cook pancakes.