March ninth

By: Emily Rankin

The desperation of necessity,

the precipice of doubt, that

astounding needed thing—

Trying to know where you are in time and space,

Trying to feel your

body trying to disappear.

Feel your feet weighed to the planet—

You’ve been here before.

You’ve been here many times before.

A moment in the

tremendous energy of the infinite universe.

Offer the body,

Offer your silence.

But the self ungrounded,

that desperate need to

cut away to the deeper complex forms—

There are these things that define you, in part

because they reflect your choices.

Life is an elaborate cosmic costume in that way.

Vibration, pleasure, past

and present percolating.

Mindful, playful,

you are what you reflect

and it gathers light in you—

a force birthed out of the roots of need:

unchanging, boundless, brimming, explosive.

The brilliance of it can break the limits of the self,

find what home is, what it means.

That is the hope, at any rate. That there is a way out.

That there is a way through.

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Emily Rankin attended University in Texas, where she received a BFA in 2011. Her work deals with the tangles of understanding, the intu-itive messages of dreaming, and subconscious exploration, and has appeared in such publications as The Voices Project, FLARE, and The Bluebird Word. She’s currently based in New Mexico.