Day 26

Challenge: Offer some instructions.

Salvation

First, start planning your escape routes. 
If you want your freedom, you’ll have to stay

clever, secret, and silent. 
Stash your resources somewhere safe 

and don’t tell anyone, not even your mother, 
that you plan to pull up roots.

Decide what’s absolutely necessary, and 
steel yourself to lose the rest. 

Say: things can be replaced.

Choose an ordinary day, like an April
Tuesday. Like today. 

Put on your coat. 
Forget the note — 

words are meaningless —
and step over the threshold for

the last time.
Leave this place the way

a soul takes its last leap
out of the body.

Day 2

Challenge: Include a bird. Be sure to identify the bird by species.

Two Robins

When I came out of the meeting, late afternoon, Friday,
the sun had decided to warm up the parking lot,
as if to underline “the weekend!” and increase the rise
of freedom's light making my skin thin and loose.

Still, I couldn’t get into my car and go, not when two robins
twittered in the budding tree just yards away, bobbing
back and forth on bare branches, flashing me their
bulging red bellies, fluttering and fidgeting like tiny soul

containers overfilled, harbingers, signals of something mighty
coming. I tried to sneak up on them, tried to hold my phone just
so, to frame them in a photo, to capture their promise in my
machine. But of course they flew, voices trailing back on

the warming air, scolding, celebrating, saying fool   fool
looktoyourself    and    gogogo   pursueyourown        release ---