When did you feel like an adult? I once asked dad.
His answers were normal: marriage, me.

Turning points, maturation, the hot flush on my cheeks
when my aunt pointed to my ten-year-old boobs in a class photo

and grinned, calling them buds. It was so like Mom,
that comment, that smile. I understood then with a shock

that they came from the same DNA, just like me and my sister,
but from a now-dead Mom—and who was she?

That was the year I signed the failed papers of the bullies
I called friends with my perfect forged parental signatures,

when I debated in my head if eating was a more honest answer
to the yearbook profile’s question of hobby, but knowing

it was more socially appropriate to write art instead. Choices.
Responsibilities. Now I sit among drunk people acting young

and abruptly remember my youth and get a little excited about
an unshakable sex dream about Eminem I once had.

Then I remember who I am, how someone thought it was a good idea
to give me a “career” and I want to lie down naked in the street

and wait for the collapse of society, for the world to regress to woods.
Think of what the flowers would look like in that landscape!

Alas, I have been inconsistent with my eco-friendly purchases
ever since someone said I have to grocery shop now

and keep the counter clean; oh bother, don’t they all know
I’m a just a ten-year-old wracked with recurring nightmares

and perpetually stumbling around for the light switch?
I think my therapist would tell me to hold her hand in the dark.

Why wouldn’t you go to the source when it’s available to you?
Why would you choose to accept a simple facsimile?

Am I extra creative or just losing my mind?
The season turns and turns and have I grown at all?

I know what feels adult: counseling my widowed father
and my divorced best friend with the same advice.

Caits Meissner is a writer and multidisciplinary artist with an expansive history of community work and DIY projects in various mediums. Her poems, comics, nonfiction and curation have appeared in The Creative Independent, The Rumpus, [PANK], Harper’s Bazaar, Adroit, Literary Hub, Split This Rock, Bust Magazine, The Normal School, The Guardian and Oprah Daily, among others. While serving as the former director of Prison and Justice Writing at PEN America, she edited The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting A Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket Books 2021), which 75K copies funded by the Mellon Foundation funded to reach incarcerated readers free of charge.