Seasonal Girl
My gynecologist told me I need to touch grass,
that my vitamin D was the second lowest
she had ever seen: 9.6 out of 100.
I laugh as if that number isn’t a quiet confession,
“You don’t go outside anymore do you?”
I used to be feral, the barefoot garden girl
who climbed every tree,
who caught toads in cupped palms
and fireflies in mason jars
until her fingers glowed.
They’d have to drag me inside,
mosquito-bitten and mud-slicked,
a walking thorn bush with skinned knees
and a grin that meant trouble.
These days I watch through a window.
Outside the bugs still kiss
the underside of leaves,
the mushrooms still split bark
like stubborn old truths,
a squirrel dies or a deer gives birth,
wind shakes loose a bird nest;
I will never see hit the ground.
None of it needs me
and there is comfort in that.
I am not the sun.
I am not the sky.
I am not the thing holding the roots in place.
I am just a girl with too little sunlight in her veins,
who melts like sugar when the heat rises,
who learns slowly to call this stillness belonging.
Because even now, even here,
I am part of it: the quiet, the crawling,
the not-quiet-deadness of a tree waiting out the winter.
Kaycee Painter is a disabled poet from Dalton, Georgia, and is the web editor for Mouthful of Salt. She writes from the body, exploring what it means to endure in a world not built for you. Her work has appeared in TrashLight Press, The Atlanta Review, and The Nonbinary Review.
Website Links:
https://kayceepainter.com/
Instagram: @k.painterpoetry