The Last Mimzy

When she was in the second grade the clouds were ivory castles in the sky & bugs were for collecting instead of stomping & fireflies were lighthouses for bees, her wizened maths and grammar teacher, who forgot that sticks are swords, sharp as imagination & the feeling of hitting river rocks with a baseball bat & couches were battleships on hardwood oceans, told her that you couldn’t stand on clouds & that you can’t eat ants even if they taste like lemons & that ‘being a house cat’ wasn’t a real career choice Sometimes I feel we’d be a little better off if we just sent kids outside instead of school. Who knows? If we did I could be writing this from my royal room in a castle in the sky or collecting bruises from blades of elm and oak drifting in nostalgic currents from lighthouse to lighthouse as I reach for another handful of ants