Today's poem is by Carrie Oeding

Will You Line Up the Children?
       

For pigtails, balance beams, cracks to break your mother's back. Everything, lines.

I wrote loops, not over and over but forward and forward and
my line was a graphite bow, a graphite flight performing an air show, a telephone cord to stories and signatures, a sideways gallop.

Put a word in. Even bird. Not even a kind of bird.
I would write that bird to be a lace bird a paltry bird a saffron sparkle word bird.

That year all the words would fall into my lines.

Even chair for you to sit down while my line kept going.
I would learn cursive and go.
I was a dot in Minnesota on I-90. I had learned about the west and the east.

A ray is a dot with a line leaving it that never ends.

This young thing wants to pirouette on the power lines.
This young thing says his thoughts are kite string.

I am putting children in all of my lines—

I have a tightrope to skim above the sea. An assembly line of square cheese. Language meet lines. Lines meet language. Those Cy Twombly chalk squiggles. Knots of excuses. Flâneur through garbage. A stomp to the bus.

Children, fall into me. Make breasts, silhouettes. I've been writing lines all of this time.

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Copyright © 2023 Carrie Oeding All rights reserved
from If I Could Give You a Line
University of Akron Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission