Why they shut my circus down

They said I was too touchy feely with the cheetahs

They didn’t know I used to be one

Fast, skinny, hungry for grass

For chalk and four-square

For my brothers before they started drinking

For my mother, before she stopped

Before the missionaries dunked her

Made her wear a jumpsuit

All of a sudden we felt bad for wanting coffee

They shut my circus down, it’s November’s fault.

The month her eyes crusted up so thick

Was bad news for the balloon people

She couldn’t eat, nerve wracked she felt milked,

Hungover, invaded.

She got lost in memories of sixth grade kickball

Of just wanting to be picked first

To make the team

To fill out her halter-tops, go on all the dates.

But days can taste like glass if you yell through them hard enough,

And she learned quick that she was good at yelling.

She was taught that brittle bones make for a good story,

And that bleeding fast like pennies is a source for strength.

So she shouted in apartment bathrooms 

Got tangled up with one too many brown haired boys 

who broke her body one lash at a time.

Ladies and Gentleman, Boys and Girls, Gather Round!

Come see the famous fondler of the the spotted cats!

Come see the most bendy backed asians yet!

Come see The Helium Family Singers, they'll make you a balloon animal while high pitch belting!

And through this curtain we have the woman pregnant with claws

Tears caking up her face with lips, thin, like dead leaves!

It wasn’t a lucrative sideshow.

Made the collage boys hurl rape confessions up in the trash

And mothers like mine were shocked and appalled.

She went alone on complaints that our decline was indeed her fault.

She was wearing stick on earrings

Shivering under the stethoscope,

Her eyes black with questions driving themselves into trees

It was then she thought to herself, 

How cold do I have to be to disappear?

 .

When the clot fell from inside her shallow

The big top collapsed 

Into the ground, a miscarried child.

The contortionists took it the worst

And started eating again.
The balloons ran, like they always do
into the atmosphere bursting like the squeels of
sixth grade girls running from base to base
in search of a safe home.

November was left clinking her fork to chicken bones

Staring blankly and full

Of harvest, gratitude, emptiness.

Sick from all her good luck.

The cats and I made it out, we fled

Jumped a train and headed lost.

Past all the men with flannel houses

Past all the door knockers, and turtlenecks.
Stopping only for the kids skateboarding on their stomachs,
Fast skinny cheetahs.
We waited at the bottom for them to race down the hills that only seemed
big to them then.

.