Like a Quick Spread Stain

(title taken from “blunt force and bomb dog”by annabelle dinda)

Your full name lives in the hollow of my throat, folded into it, small as an origami crane. When I sip and swallow, you begin to grow bigger. You take flight inside of me.

Do you remember grabbing the paper and then my hands and helping them form the body of freedom?

Up high, 26,000 feet high, cranes do not look like animals at all. You will squint and believe them to be stars.

A senior in my second period class placed three cranes on my desk. Just like that. They did not tell me why they made them, only that they wanted me to have them.

I said, “I did the same for my teachers,” and, “an old friend taught me how.”

On the train home from work, an old woman calls your name, her soft voice stretched into a single vowel.

The woman who answers does not wear your face, but still, she takes the small hands of her mother into her own. She clasps them and rubs her thumb along them, the deep creases of aging. It is so cold, she says, zip your jacket— here, I’ll do it for you. And she does. I watch her until I feel warm.

At night, I fold myself into the smallest particle of being— the quick flick of a lighter, a billow of snow caught in the confines of wind, floating for the entirety of a lifetime, a wingspan of a creature already fallen—

and your name spills from my open mouth.

I am already creased and dreaming.