Tricking Gravity

When the breeze first lifted me, I felt dangerously buoyant. I trembled like a baffled nestling. But then I relaxed into the air, let the sky embrace me. For the first time, sunrise painted me on all sides – pink, everywhere. I was weightless. Disguised as inconsequential, like a dust mote, I tricked gravity into ignoring me. I inhaled the fragrance rising from the world. I began to hear the silence that precedes blossoming, that blank space before the almost inaudible velvet-slip of petals unfurling. I held my future, all possibilities, locked safe inside me. I was a speck of pollen floating in the rosy throat of a tulip. Suspended above its secret black pinwheel, I waited for a gust of wind.

Excerpt from "Tricking Gravity" a prose poem from Stirring the Mirror, first published in The Bitter Oleander.