There isn’t much blue outside my window,
and I think this is important somehow –
in the way it is important that no one drives into my court
unless they’re turning around, and now even less.

Princess of the clouds, I used to call myself –
stitch it to my clothing tags, carve it into my desk.
If my blinds are down I just see grass,
so I keep them up all the time, even when I’m changing,
even when the sun and clouds and light are gone.

Once I told my neighbor that I keep myself in lowercase to be soft,
but I took a plane once and learned that nothing up there is soft,
all pellucid, intangible. Now I switch it up:
keep myself on my toes with the rest of the neighborhood
who live in a way that makes sense: not loud, not quiet, not either.

Let me tell you about my neighborhood:
              it always sounds like lawnmowers and smells like shampoo.
              Go too far back, you’ll feel lost with those you aren’t,
              better to stay up front where the trees know more than you.
              There is always sky.

In April the birds talk again outside my window,
and I’ve never been able to place them: tree branch, sky, ground.
Somewhere on earth there is someone who can.

Really I only listen when the air comes down from up,
when I feel the blue fill the spaces it shouldn’t.
Science calls the sky transparent,
but I try to save words like that for myself.
I almost failed biology.

It’s no coincidence that the map on my wall is almost all blue –
maybe the ocean invaded the sky’s space,
but really I think there’s no invasion if the blankness is there for you.

One day I’ll find a cloud that will let me walk on it – like walking on water but real.

Sophie Foster is an eighteen-year-old writer based just outside of Baltimore, Maryland. She has previously received a Gold Medal in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, but if asked, she would say her biggest accomplishment thus far has been spelling the word apostrophe correctly during the school spelling bee in third grade. She can be found walking at twice the speed of a normal person down any street in her neighborhood, or on Instagram at @sophiefoster.