A SYNONYM FOR ESTRANGEMENT by Rowan Tate

I was made on an acre of land where the trees

remember everything: the places we invented

under splayed branches of manzanita when we were

seven and naming the dirt, the cherry popsicle sticks we buried

like bones between its roots as we grew up and

forgot the meaning of objects, the bodies

we held against their trunks that

never came back again.

I turn fourteen and trade soil for plastic, bark

for gorilla glass, fingers for a stylus. I

read about nitrogen cycles and I walk on sidewalks, 

sit on metal. The sky above me

is always white and hard. When I am twenty,

I will tattoo the tree outside my window onto my left arm

I will still get my coffee in a paper cup and

put my peanut butter jars in the trash and ask

for my receipt and I will not know

the Latin names for living things.

Rowan Tate is a creative and curator of beauty. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.