If you are an unspoken word

I could hold you in my parentheses

we would be our own phrase

a nine-month long aside

not quite loud enough for others to hear.

The next person over (read: father)

will say what?

and so you’ll slip out of me and scream.

How I long to learn

the shape of your letters

the book in your eyes

the sounds of your syllables.

With you inside me, you could dot my i’s

turn me into an atmosphere

and you a planet

and to us others would be only distant stars

your father a moon orbiting with borrowed light.

If you are six days growing, I could be your seventh.

If you are a wisp of life, I could be your stalk.

If you are a line of a six-act play,

I could be the backdrop.

I could be your anything.

All I have to do is thicken

lay down sediment like sand in geologic time.

All you have to do is cut in

burrow deep

and don’t stop growing.

Meredith Kirkwood lives and writes in the Lents neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, Rogue Agent, Variant Literature, ONE ART, and Doubleback Review, among others. Find her on the web at www.meredithkirkwood.net.