By Merima Tricic

Time and these fleeting feelings are equivalent,

Give me a painted wooden mask with blood-red streaks across its cheeks,

And let me upon my own trail amongst tall bamboo trees and leafy ambushes.

Give me my own tipped flint stones with its white edges fading,

And let me spread my arms out to the fate of chance, the futility of certainty.

With each word, each single consonant, each letter or sound

My heart yearns to walk upon the dirt paths of the unknown

And red-lipped sprawling frogs upon the forest floors.

Let the music ring from the bottom of my feet through my chest and out from my lips,

Ban not the power that surges within these veins that cry to be released.

Tie not my body with wispy ropes and itching threads,

and let the voices that boom within me to lead me ahead.

With each cry of a child that arrives into this world, red and squalling,

we present it with It's Box- a girl, a boy, black, white, Bosnian, American.  

And for the rest of our lives, these boxes remain invisibly--

     a permanent fixation of pretend social order and control.

If I am to live my life in this inescapable glass box,

Where corners leak in few essences of reality and “naturality,”