there is more than one way to look at it.
outside the wood gift shop there is the desert, the gray hill
but the scrub shivers like hatching. there is more than just one life.
you get off work and your pockets ring your magnet rocks, your change
and the girls all wave so nice to you and the blue sky spills out big.
but when you walk out in the sagebrush the camel crickets still crowd around you
like the sea.
brown thumbs of their bodies long grass of their legs
there is more than one way to look.
the desert shows you things sometimes. yourself in other things.
you crouch down til you see it in their black magnet eyes.
their leader beckons you with his sweet finger his back leg and in his change
ringing voice he makes his speeches about hatching.
the others know it by then. they split open their brown shells.
their new legs crawl them forward. their new mouthparts take hold.
it’s not a bad thing, says their leader. but he says that every time.
he splits your shell with his long back leg and there is more than one side:
there is the sweet dark of your first life and there is blue milk
gray breast
sun.
i’m not ready, you say.
the laughter rings. it changes
they grip the open skin of you. their leader shakes his head.
he says, there is no ready.
and all at once they jump.
Maya is a writer and educator from Michigan. Her work lately focuses on growing up—how the worlds we live in as young people are full of strange delusions and equally strange truths.