I traced a girl's ear.
krammer abrahams

It looked like a nose; a lump pear; old cartoon feet; my mother's burlap sack; my third grade teacher's burlap sack full of cottage cheese; rotten marbles; unfinished business on a Friday evening; the loop over there, but not quite here; an approaching doom; a diagram of my brother's first lap nearly completed at the go-cart track; a flat tire Sunday morning on the way to church and even though the children are happy and excited that they'll probably miss service they don't jump up and down because they're still weary of god and fear what he or she might do to them if it is seen that they are celebrating on the day of weekly devotion; the state of Ohio; Styrofoam bells; the head of an octopus if I was asked to trace it; my favorite honey pot after my neighbor brought it with them camping in Alaska even though I only lent it to them to use solely for collecting some sweetness out back in the honey fields (they even promised to give me some treats of which I've seen none) and not to help trap a bear and subsequently get half of my pot and most of my tent -- which they also borrowed -- eaten; a gnome asleep in a turtle shell; a turtle asleep in the beard of a gnome; an ice cube lying on the sidewalk in mid-afternoon of a mild, but not particularly humid day after it slipped through the neck hole of someone who has throat cancer and who is now tipping back a disposable cup to get another ice cube while making a conscious effort not to let this ice cube end up the same as the last; an old light bulb after it's burnt out and been tossed away in a bucket full of moldy lettuce heads and the insides of green peppers; a moldy lettuce head; the thing that was in the mouth of a girl who jokes that she wants to be the female Van Gogh and who would like me to believe thanks to all the costume store effects that she decided to sever a piece of her mind a few days prior and then -- to add a twist to her own legend and to dull the supposed pain -- chew on it for a bit before spitting it out on the white lined paper of a boy writing in his journal.