My favorite colors test me.

My skin is as transparent as saran wrap. Purple and green veins show through my legs like leftover green beans and baby eggplants.

Boston

Boston, you are a wise old city. Why do you dress so young? I should be tripping over your broken cobblestones, not searching for them.

A Cough

I slouch like an old man. Then tense like a toddler taking a turd. I pack my purse, toss my trash and run out of the cafe where everyone knows I need to cough. Everyone knows I was just being polite, not coughing. I swing open the glass door, turn toward the pharmacy and decide on a pit-spit-stop. Turning down a small alley, I find privacy and behind a brick wall, I spit like a tobacco chewing dugout couch. I walk away, disgusted with my bodily fluid functions. After I buy tissues, cough syrup and cough drops, I walk home and imagine dying while everyone else is at work. 

Burp

A little boy told his mother, "Mommy, I burped out of my bum."

He didn't know the word fart, we are told as we laugh and look in on the little boy sleeping in his car seat. Burped out of his bum, brilliant, little boy, brilliant.

Bananas

As if the letters of my sentences were bananas, peanut butter and ice cream, I throw them all into a high speed blender and watch as they twist and flip and somersault into a thick silence.
Articulation: can I put that on my wedding registry? 

Hiding behind Plastic

He drives the station wagon straight into piercingly sharp sunshine and yet refuses to communicate with me after I have put on my sunglasses. "I can't see you!" He says with the subtle accompaniment of sweet selfishness. "My forehead hurts from squinting." I say back watching as he shakes his head at the large white sunglasses resting on the bridge of my nose. He looks back to the highway. I pull down the mirror and look at the reflection of my self-conscious sunglass state. I take off the sunglasses, squint, shove the mirror back to the ceiling, squint for another minute more, and then I shove the glasses back on, cross my arms, and spit out, "Don't tell me what to do!"

Quit

I need to quit my job. I need to step out of this nest of thorns and hope and fight for flight. This relationship is emotionally abusive.

Sit sipping

As I sit sipping my cappuccino, I can't help but adjust my pants and shirt. It is  a quiet attempt to find flattery in an un-flat belly. Usually, it doesn't bother me. I am twenty five years old and my body has grown and stretched to its current shape for one natural reason: to grow and stretch into another shape entirely, the shape to carry another growing shape.

Then I think to myself: a bicycle on a busy narrow sidewalk is like a wild llama in a doll house. A completely unrelated thought, but a true observation. Ride on the side of the street, you idiot.