by Rachel Linton
You are a verb. May we all be so lucky—
to live so as to become motion, encode
ourselves in the muscle memory of the Earth.
Most will never get that far; we die
in chrysalis, poor frozen pupa, unchosen
to break free.
The world aspires to movement.
Language mocks itself to make entropy
a noun, or worse, a clunky -ic
of an adjective. Don’t waste your time
with description or object-work
when you are flying outwards at a rate
of forty-six miles per second. Breathe
is a much bigger word than breath,
out of proportion with the extra ‘e’.
I am a little in love with the universe,
not so much for its size but because
it is still growing. I want there to always
be a next frontier. I want the shell
of the world to someday, cocoon-like,
split open.
Rachel Linton is a playwright, poet, and law student at the University of Chicago. Her poems have previously appeared in Rollick Magazine, Cathedral Canyon Review, Queer Toronto Literary Magazine, and The Quarter(ly), and are forthcoming in The Sunlight Press.
Emerge Literary Journal 