Apart

Angry for being angry,
she stabs the eraser with a pen.
The melted wax on her desk lamp
starts to burn and makes the light
the same color as the crayons were.
The lightning bugs look like satellites
from her window. Only smaller as
if her street was another galaxy.
Moving apart from the center of everything,
it was music without the sound, but
still she heard it in the center of her eardrums.
Looking at the ceiling was like staring into the
next day, where everything she wanted would
be out of reach. This used to be just simple
inclusion, an acknowledgment from others
that she was there, but now
whenever the phone rang her eyes
refocused like a camera, making things
clearer at first then unrecognizable.
The bricks in the walkway were painted
to look like faces, and that path marked
the way from her door to the driveway.
The reason for it was the same as
her mother’s reason for marrying her father.
Sometimes she needed to walk all over someone.