Learning Yoga in the Psych Ward

Lay the towel out on the hallway floor.

Breathe. Look down the path, shrinking

like a rabbit hole, slithering out of sight like a snake.

A passage. How do I get to the places I find my body in?

Bend my knees backwards. Breathe. From the

deepest valley this oxygen can sink. Hold my head

between my thighs, feel the pressure of walking

turned upside down. Stare at the wall.

Stare at where the wall meets the ceiling.

Make the ceiling into something other than a container,

think of the people who painted the ceiling,

who hid plaster under the color of plaster,

who stood on ladders to install lighting fixtures,

who stepped down and walked to the next,

then the next, then the next.

Washed their shirts of paint splatter when they

made it home.

Turn fluorescents into sunlight, turn peeled off-white

into night lights hitting a dark pool, turn it into

the love the doctors lost, the heart they left behind

for linoleum floors and periwinkle gloves, for

pill bottle currency, for signatures, for autographs.

To conquer souls that torment the keypad lock,

push them back into unseen coffins.

Breathe. You always have. Bend far enough to time travel.

To freeze time, as long as the minute hand knows

which direction to turn afterwards.

June breathes behind the window. If I could've held on

to the end of May, tightened my leash. I'm sorry I never studied

a clock so closely before. The digital forgot that

you move in circles. You're a whirlpool. I'm sorry I

swam against the current.

Don't breathe. Let the holes in your skin do the work.

Let the goosebumps haunt.

Place my heels on the wall. Let my arms

anchor ground, let my knuckles hold the punches.

Be a patient of patience.

Remember sitting above pools, remember

lifeguard red, think of watching the sun climb behind the

clouds until the shadows on the water turn into a single darkness.

Remember being held to the seat as it happens.

Think of the next morning, how it will react the same,

but differently. How reflections are just the bottom of the sky.

How the sun shifts its position from May to August, makes

the trees dance to its songs. What it feels to notice the

universe's secrets. What it feels to know evil is made of this.

To know there is no evil to the branches.

They spread far across the sky and hugged the myth

of heaven before words and flesh came to

cut down their reach and still, there is no evil.

One day, this won't be the last place I've been.