Kansas

My world is made from cotton clouds

and cardboard stars, costumes are clothes and make-believe is real. The sights transform in explosive

dreams and alphabets made from

moonlight. Find me bowing to a portal

filled with waltzing brushstrokes

or scribbling through the smudged

landscapes of chalky trees, covered from

head to toe in the dust of their leaves, Sheltered in a paper glade, stirring cauldrons

of consonants, and swallowing vowel soup. Travellers peer through the windows

and wonder how I’m not yet blind. But what the sweeping plains were monochromatic

until the day I found them.