2

Yesterday morning, as I walked six bus stops with my iPod on loop,
a Chinese woman with pigtails I once twisted wore a pair of sweatpants,
graying and torn, with a beige thermal and vest, limp in the wind.
She was running--past the gas station and the intersection where
an American muscle car waited impatiently. A couple on bikes stopped
next to me, giggling to themselves for a moment, and I wished I was her.
Not afraid of the could be car peeling down her lane as she outstretched
like the plane I rode in on. It's the way the pigtails slapped the wind.
The almost childlike hair ties tucked at the ends, like the laugh that lingers
outside my window and clings to curtains. Something for the lovers, maybe.
For the ones suffering from fernweh, or those that stare at the church steeple
from the ninth floor as something sickens deep down, screams at you to run,
not from, but to the darkening skyline--a crimson only dead bodies know.