How To Be A Protagonist (SAB)

The girl with mercurial eyes reads minds, solves
crimes, and finds a solid-eyed boy to love.

The angry boy who sleeps under
his uncle’s staircase whispers to snakes.

Loved by sad girls everywhere the suicide poet
is immortalized. The siblings with six toes

hike to utopia. You ate a cloud and felt
cold for sixteen years. You ate the ghost
of Sylvia Plath all afternoon

in your lilac room and tried to identify
the defect that will qualify you
as a heroine. You touch your naval

twenty times, but no narnia appears.
In dreams sometimes you fly
but mostly loiter the mall and skip

over lava in Bowser’s castle.
Could living in Alaska’s armpit be your defect,
your town so small it’s been allotted no

dot on the map? From where you’re
standing the world is four liquor stores

and an aluminum smelter. It ends
at the treeline on Elizabeth Mountain.

The world is a series of streets named
after birds, which form a circle with no
beginning, every driveway a dead end.

-Kayla Czaga