I want to write about regrets.

About not regretting and not wanting what we cannot have.

I want to write about attachment to the people we love and miss and its opposite.

The way I remember how it feels lighting Tibetan incense on your back balcony in the chilly morning sipping green tea and sucking in poison smoke.

How this feeling can be captured gently, like a butterfly between two cupped hands and listened to.

Slight scratching antennae and soft beat of wings.

Recorded and made into song.

A symphony of cars people buildings grass bark on trees crackling.

Laughing people of all ages shapes and sizes.

Colors which make sound, fans overhead pushing air about a stagnant room so the walls don’t close in.

Bleep of a laptop and cry of a kurlu.

Cluck of the insects as the sun sets.

Impulse to misbehave but do what?

At the leaping of the heart in my chest

for it is for no one near me I pine

but the earth and this world,

all of it,

undiscovered by me and willing me to partake in its glorious spectacle as it creeps through night and bursts into day.

Roots shooting down as stalks shoot up sporadically making noise

a cacophony against destruction moulded in a baking tray the universe welded together.

My hair cut as short as the forests

I apply a magical balm to heal its soul and make it grow

Faster, before time runs short.

It is loud how fast it is going.

I wish to stretch it slow it savor it keep it record it share its beauty so i am not consumed,

intoxicated by its vastness let it run through me and my pen as a gift back to you mother

gaia, goddess, god, man, woman, child all that is or was condensed in my palm.

In this butterfly half eaten by a cat

I found you twitching on the pavement

I couldn’t rescue you and in my clumsiness some of your color rubbed off onto my fingers

Now you sit on this tree I have placed you on, which is all things too, and you die.

editor: Greg Eckard

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Cassidy Maier is a roaming adventurer caught between the worlds. She enjoys creating in all its forms, especially on the page with spontaneity and in the kitchen with organic and locally sourced ingredients.