She doesn't know why
she has to be the queen of one hundred crunchy people:
the ones who go shopping and buy special cleaners
for different surfaces and hard-to-reach areas and yet they leave
two hundred footsteps on her walkway.
She wants to get her nose pierced
She wants to take a bath in milk
She wants to walk on the beach with another girl,
a friend,
in simple conversation, arm in arm,
and with an old Instamatic camera, take a picture of the selkie tracks left in the sand.
At moonrise, the waves reveal a path
and the Queen's girlfriend fires up the VW van so they can drive
right into the ocean, on the path left bare
by the outgoing tide
to a far, far island to research knitting patterns
and the Queen and the Queen's friend
will skirl their thoughts into the wool
and give them to the poor to wear.
Instead, she must be Queen of one hundred crunchy people.
She knows this, but still
when the moon rises, she can't help waking up
to tiptoe to the window, to look through the glass
at the tracks that aren't there yet in the sand
