A group of nudists were traveling to Simmons to be naked near Lake Ivan. Jerry read about it in the paper, or saw it on the news, and he was telling me about it as I tried to parallel park out front of our daughter’s school. We’d been called in because Brigid’s teacher wanted to speak with us. And the principal. And the school counselor.

Harper was being declawed, the stainless-steel clippers snipping her nails to pathetic nubs. According to her mother, it was for her own good—Harper couldn’t stop scratching. Lately, she was always scratchy. Plagued by a deep-down itch that seemed to pulse from her bones. Or her organs, maybe. Somewhere her skin wouldn’t let her reach. She was constantly itching herself.

I was four foot, one 
caterpillar. Black hair
all tussle & God-talk. 
Slim prayers pop-flying 
from this gone bad fruit
for mouth. I stayed low.
Played king to the crickets. 
I was salt lick. Spoonfed. 

Wednesday might be my favorite day. 
All the bakeries in Berkeley open and 
with a little conviction you can persuade 
the guard you belong on the manicured 
lawn of the tennis club, and maybe even 
join the ladies and their ten-brim visors 
for a sandwich of jambon and Gruyère.

Everyone knows it takes more than one exit to disappear. It’s too easy to pull someone back in over a single threshold; to escape, you need a path so littered with doorways and arches that once you pass through and keep walking, there’s no going back. And no one can find you.

I walk down the blaring avenue, across Klingle Valley Bridge, past condo buildings and side-street bungalows to the place where pavement dead-ends and forest begins. A flock of blackbirds whirls from a leafless tree, swooping and soaring above me and everything. Down the path I go toward Rock Creek. The air smells fertile, of winter’s rot and mold come clean and soil freshly remade.