Contemplating Light

How do I tell my teacher
I need to swallow sunshine
in great greedy gulps.

Miss Kulp, blankly white in her correctness,
tries to help the new girl, the military brat,
watches me throw lunch away
day after day, calls my mother.
“Why don’t I eat?” she worries

We live in our temporary home,
a shiny silver trailer,
after yet one more move to the chilly
frost of a Pennsylvania winter
where we float on a sea of happy lies.

I want only to return to Florida.
Where sun cascades over my desk
and Miss Lopez’s olive skin spreads
a rhythmic heat over us all.

School there was my safe harbor,
ruled paper, swaddling clothes
assignments read, my lullaby.

Now we put on a play, The Solar System.
I ache, ache to be the sun,
to be gobbled up by that warm yellow felt.

Then a class vote to assign planet parts;
the favorites go quickly.
All that is left in the end,
the tail on Halley’s Comet and me.

So, the tail and I meld into one,
streak across the stage,
in a stream of humiliation
and cold tinseled light.

Nothing is warm again,
until the day we return
to the place I belong.
The land where the St. Petersburg Times promises,
“If the sun doesn’t shine today
The evening newspaper is free.”