Weirdo Poem by Maya Stein

The familiar estrangement, a serrated edge accompanying you
to block parties and soccer games and dinner with the in-laws.
While you bluster and bobble, you long for a quiet room with only
a jigsaw puzzle for company, a notebook, a camera, a caress
on your shoulder blades - anything to bring you back to center. Anywhere but here.
But when you tell yourself that story, the one pinning you against all odds,
foraging for some mythical oasis, you divorce yourself from a landscape
thirsty for wildness, for the dissonant, the eccentric. Plant your roots here
instead, and make of this collision a swimming pool, a theater, a basketball court,
a kitchen windowsill where cactus thrives alongside basil, and is just as green.