Finally I am feeling the soft cramps of menstruation

Another red start

Another spreadsheet where every cell is a day containing local weather

It adds up to a project

What about a war that only lasts five hours?

Still the pixels green and die

Still I navigate to objectsobjectsobjects.com

In 8 th grade geometry I learned to hate the sound of trace emerging from beneath my teacher’s mustache

A wobbly copy of a circle

I am still interested in simulation

In trying to understand a thing by recreating it in small

This epidemic isn’t real, I tell my students as I use an eyedropper to indicate who is diseased

They hold their plastic cups out toward me and the ones containing water laced with soda ash turn vivid fuchsia and they scream

Well, terror is infectious, too

My final project, I decide, will be planting

I dreamt of wildflowers again

The bird said, if I seize you I will seize you and will squeeze you till you squirt

Well, not actually, but that’s a trick to easily identify this bird by name

The warbling vireo, a tiny songbird

I identified the bird using a video that captured the sound of the camera zooming in to find the bird, metal against metal, singing krrrrrrrr

The river thrilled me, I would tell you

This thing runs all day, I said

Sometimes it feels it isn’t me who’s speaking when I speak

Well, I am my own personal stranger

My own personal jerk emails me to say that videographer seems reductive

and “idk what happened but it happened”

and that he “like(d) having me as a friend”

and signed off *fart noise*

which is the part that made me sad, that asterisk jacket

I read that song diversity predicts the viability of fragmented bird populations

Whether they will live in the face of widespread anthropogenic habitat destruction

Basically the birds aren’t learning songs the way they used to

And they’re dying

A bird’s birdsong is its species language, special

I want this in this poem though it is already a poem

The birds, I mean; the singing

I learned to hide my body when I was young

How to be a highway and rest stop and dirt road and all-at-once

I believe that recreation is dangerous

As evidence: The Oregon Trail, developed as an educational computer game

As evidence: my childhood home in Indian Hills

As evidence: my faithful daily pop-up, telling me to update to macOS Mojave

As evidence: in 4 th grade I made mastaw for Heritage Day and watched as everyone spit it out

I hadn’t known until that day how sour yogurt is

Whose idea was it to hold a Heritage Day?

Well, I’ve taught and failed children too

Sometimes italics really sting

In Kurdish mastaw means yogurt-water

Mast is yogurt, aw is water, and together they mean exactly what they mean

My mother called to say she is officially a master naturalist

She earned her certificate by weighing native birds

In the hand, she said, the body of a bird feels mostly empty

My own hands are dense and mechanically healing

How much can a project contain?

Well, I dreamt of wildflowers again

I dreamt I roamed the field and scattered a crafted mix from a bag labeled fleurs sauvages

What makes a flower wild?

Not my hand that casts its seed in soil and says, now you can grow

But maybe flowers can refuse domestication

Can grow wild, again, all on their own