Poem for Dangling Invisibly From Trees

Elizabeth Keller

I have X-ray vision sometimes. I’m also invisible. I’m a bit 

of a medical miracle. I try not to be stuck up about it, but now

it’s autumn and the pine forests are unchanging and I’m telling

Izzy in biology that I can see her spleen, a shaded grove 

of bile, squirrels swimming, shimmery acid slicking

down their tails, and the sloshes when she moves

make a rhythm that mirrors her heartbeat and everything

is just so beautiful, you know? All to say, I could cry 

but I am just a disembodied voice hovering 

like an off-brand sleep paralysis demon over her shoulder. 

Turning back to the board, writing squirrels’ hearts 

make a protective metabolic shift to hibernate, and the cell 

cycle has four phases, and a lotus seed can wait in a peat bog 

for two thousand years. So what if I follow Izzy after biology, 

so what if I sit, cross-legged on the roof of her rusty blue 

pick-up truck, so what if I focus on all the translucent roots 

winding through the dashboard as the messages play, someone 

with a soothing sort of voice says honey, we miss you, honey, 

it’s been so long, honey, please come home. And the roots 

make me sad sometimes, so I climb a Douglas fir and hang 

upside down and think about Izzy’s car and how the gears 

and the steering wheel nestle together like a heartbeat and really, 

who’s to tell me that it isn’t? And Izzy’s gone and I’m invisible 

and I climb the squirrel-filled trees to drop a pinecone, 

still green, onto the ground and if nobody hears the soft thud 

as it strikes the needles, then what should I make 

of the hundreds of never-blinking eyes, staring, staring?

Elizabeth Keller is a junior creative writing major at Interlochen Arts Academy, and is from Vancouver, Washington. She has been published in Crashtest and her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Virginia B. Ball Creative Writing Competition, and the Richard Benvenuto High School Poetry Competition.