Into a yellowing spring. I now see

Eleven years into my adulthood

I am a woman who will empty herself

Of resistance upon encounter of light,

Of any color.

I do not hesitate to drive, or even walk,

In the direction of deep shades

Of zodiacal darkening. Of the hot

Pink electronic emptiness

Released in any neighbor’s window. What is worse is when
An area
Unexpectedly unlocks, whitens and blinds. I

Am unlikely to open my own mail. Unbound,

I like to live
Lightly, in love with loosed earth, unlimited

To dirt, demarcated not by roots or the limbs

Of other’s trees, but by fallen leaves, the wash
Off graves. I know I sound like a little ghoul
Girl but too often I want to stand at a platform, a sub

Way structure ajar into winter and not wish for other

Seasons or times, of course I have lived all these

Years under and I am committed to understanding

The intent of animals with eyes not opened
Up all the way. Moles, little rock babies, unhaired

Fatty mammals don’t differentiate between

Dream and day, do not invent a thing like
A curtain. What is furniture except another
Apparatus
A way to insist on eating inside a human house? I

Try harder & I try higher to send sounds through
The tubes & tunnels that access womanish words, I

Pull closed the shower door, I cover my nails beds
With lacquer and shine and in another effort at imposs

Ible peopling, I speak and sound like ideas. Red, pink
Plastic carnations, photos, other fancy trash

Flooded out from the uppermost monuments

Fence the edges of the memory garden. Far
Away a flying thing rings itself with its own

Feathers, it takes hours and it takes hours and

It happens everyday and as I approach the season
Of the extension of the light

I try also
To enter the circlet, to be not only surrounded but touched

***

Candice Wuehle is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa where she has taught rhetoric and creative writing at The University of Iowa. She holds a Masters in Literature from the University of Minnesota and is a PhD candidate at the University of Kansas.

Her work can be found in “The Volta”, “NOO”, “Fairy Tale Review”, “BlazeVOX”, “SOFTBLOW”, “Smoking Glue Gun”, “Quarter After Eight”, “Similar:Peaks::” and “The Sonora Review”. Candice’s first chapbook, “cursewords”, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.