Contributor: Anna Dunn

- -
I don’t know how to be
What I wanted to be when I was nine
But You don’t have to be an astronaut
To feel stars soaking into your skin
walking the earth and sea
Creates its own tiny universe

Where you exist alone
But with 800 others
All children of the ocean but
Siblings are very different

Sitting on the top of your odyssey
Surrounded by look alikes of
Your High school bullies
Getting back from lands unseen
Doesn’t seem to change they way they think
Like you’d wish to see
And traveling the world may as well be
Sitting at home if you can’t remember
How it felt to inhale every second

Not getting to let a breath back out
Before people try to cram meaning into your chest
By treating students like numbers
Checking off names on clipboards
Like items on a to do list
Not really hearing

When I say Privilege Is in my skin and blood and cells
And each day I try not to
fire off the bullet that is myself
But it’s inevitable as I pass through each new country
Five days is nothing
I’m lightning
Politics shouldn’t be egg shells
Don’t act like you’re scared to cut your feet

Step on new ground with your feet bare
And heart full of galaxies
And watch the sun sink into the sea
And the moon laugh at the clouds
While I inhale the sky into my lungs
At the thought that the
planet rotates differently for us
Everything crumbling and rebuilding without us and
We without everything else

I met a new person in the mirror the other day
Freckles have bloomed with the springtime
and created constellations on
A newly carved face
I met new friends and we grew into each other like vines and
carved each others DNA into our feet
Creating a home where the anchor drops

A home with a girl who’s distinctive
In her love
that she doesn’t think is Enough
Calling herself insensitive
When she burns red hot protection

Miranda is a moon in our solar system
But my Miranda is more like the sun
Giving off energy
We’re plants photosynthesizing her being
And her everything
Growing and growing

Until we reach the clouds
My neighbor is going home to Texas
She’s made of all natural ingredients
And kindness branches through her bones
Where her arms wrap around me as tears create salty rivers on my cheeks

She’s the clouds making it cooler at day
And warmer at night
Alyanna will always stick into
My memory like the
Way my name is a part of hers
Never to be invisible again

And when it’s dark
My friend, The moon is always there
Like I thought when I was young
But I’m not going back to abandonment issues
Or thinking I’m not good enough
When she shines down on me
Laughing like the world is hers

Shannon is a lucky name
And it’s lucky that we met in the first place
More lit up than streets that might in Hong Kong
Starting something strange and tentative blooming higher than the moon reaching
All the way to you
Breaking past barriers
Creating craters exposing more layers
And we’d never hesitate at what we found
Underneath and never will

And I could go on until I’m blue in the face
So many people I would try and swim the pacific for
and
These memories will last until my feet rot in the dirt and
I don’t know how to be When I return
when I leave my new floating home
For the final time it will be a second birth
My shadow will be haunted by the memory of my name
Thinking she's afraid of traffic and romance and change
But she is me before thousands of miles
And change is the only thing that’s consistent anymore

I don’t know how to be what I wanted to be
When I was nine
But if she knew all I’d see
And the people I’d meet
She’d want to be me and want this life to be mine

And when I return
It’ll be like breathing the clouds back into the sky
Until there’s nothing left in my chest
And anyone who could understand
Is here tonight
And won’t be with me in the quiet
It’ll just be me new and returning to the home of a stranger
Because when you see enough of the world you come back a foreigner
Lonely and changed but
Never regretting a single step

I don’t know how to be
After tasting the sun
And walking on the sea
I don’t know how to be


- - -
Anna Dunn is a student at Sarah Lawrence College studying creative writing and psychology. She just got back from a journey around the world on the ship and hopes to travel in the future.