affinity to kansas (twenty-seven lines of sad prairie words)

these are flowers of the wind.

this ground knows the contours of your face

and the weight of your toes

and sometimes you can feel the earth breathe

as it swells beneath your feet.

there is a strange feeling to coming home,

to stretching into the same cotton sheets

and breathing into the same sky

just as when your eyes were a little younger,

your skin was not creased,

your bones still stretching against muscle for the first time.

but your bones are paler, now,

your skin has spilled six times since last you were here

and you have eyes of old moons.

(it’s never quite the same.)

how strange it is, then, to unfold into it all again,

lungs breathing in tandem with greying daylight,

expanding and lifting just as they always have.

the orangey kitchen light is a frayed familiarity;

the jazz,

the loud rapture,

the people that smell like something that creaks

like the floorboards in your emptied bedroom.

frost curls over soil worn by prairie winters

and you are listening to saxophones on a scratchy record player

as you crawl into the comfort of coming home.

(you sometimes wonder why the mouth of the sky never seems to change.)