Ten Years of Age

The girl with her viridescent fingerprints
through her first act of life,
whose ground she has paced for a decade,
traces her fingertips on the teal fences,
that come away flaking auburn powder.


Her black school shoes
with chalk-white prints
gently graze the crewcut lawn.


Her checkered dress swings in the wind,
seeds of weeping love-grass
catching on the cotton hem.


The mid-week midsummer wind
blows a thousand needle pricks
on her molten milk chocolate eyes.


She plucks a stalk
and with the same fingertips grazed from the rusted fence,
ties a knot around the iron,
tethering her plucked, withering sanity
on the fence that owned her youth.