Ana Garza
		Cross-Legged on the Grass Till now, my muse Failure has taught me how to cling with my fists to the ever loosening skin of the earth, curving down from the hem of my skirt, my legs folded under, a paper bag beside my knee. Till now, she has been the one sharing my meal: tap water in a dented plastic bottle, cold Chinese noodles, an apple lifted slyly from a shelf of damaged things. Till now, she has been the one to chatter endlessly about physics: curvature and motion, momentum, inertia, the certitude that all bodies that cling to convex surfaces must slide, the inevitability of rest. She has sipped from me through the water bottle at my lips, spoken to me, leaned forward like the hollow rush inside the bottle, the sound I hear in dreams about slipping off all surfaces and burning to a cloud before the muscles drop into airless space. “If you lie back,” she says, “tip,” she says, “your shoulders, arc your hips to make your body the true meniscus of space,” she breathes, “and if you tense the tendons behind your knees to shape the fungus by your wrists, if you regulate your breathing so the outline of your belly forms the seal between the sky and you, and if the tightness of the water closes at your neck exactly where the skin above your shoulders flutters, contoured like your throat--then you can draw your mouth into an undulating song and, singing, never sink into the wet or slide. "Or slide.” And she sighs, the smell of plastic and of chlorinated drink spilling on my skirt, my fingers catching tightly to the grass.