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 the author of the chapbooks curse words: a guide in 19 steps for aspiring transmographs (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) and EARTH*AIR*FIRE*WATER*ÆTHER (Grey Books Press, 2015). Her work can be found in Tarpaulin Sky, The Volta, The Colorado Review, SPORK, and PRELUDE, among others. She is originally from Iowa City, Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Candice currently resides in Lawrence, Kansas where she is a Chancellor’s Fellow at The University of Kansas as well as Poetry Editor for Beecher’s Magazine.