Edna

I feel like Edna, trapped on my Louisiana porch, arrested by the humidity and listening to a parrot squawk shit it heard Adele say last week. We emerged ourselves in infinity, swam naked in the ocean, under the moon, thought about the shapes the stars made, before Galileo taught us about gravity and I believed that there was fishing line stretched thin between the planets. I feel like Edna, leaving you in favor of the one room house around the block where I can eat tea cakes alone in my bay window and write about the water. I'm self-indulgent. I want solitude and decadence. I will refuse to make sacrifices for you. My thighs rub together. They will rub together in the water, in the Gulf, when I'm waiting for my legs to tire. I feel like the woman I wrote about, smoking cigarettes in her red dress, drawing a bird in the sand and speaking in tongues about canvases. Darling, you are simply not among us. Maybe that is me. Maybe I'm the woman who will leave her family to live in a downtown flat when she's fifty.