Really

Island is measured by where I put my eyes––in the cousin room in Utah there were two queen beds meant to hold the many of us they put us in there nightly together to sleep but of course we liked and competed with one another it was jokes we would make and noise as a byproduct of joke so some of the adults would come and say

ladies too loud we can hear you we’re trying to wind down who’s it going to be and by that they meant who are you going to blame we had to vote someone off it was based on television our adults had learned as a rule on TV that any group will if asked throw one member out with the bath so they would come in to say to us

ok look you are together on an island that island is your bed and someone is about to be voted off at which we would get into our voting blocs the older girls deciding who it would be to go they liked it a little working with the adults collaborative exile getting acknowledged for their power and more than once yeah it was me

who was sent without protection alone to the alternate room I cried in the bed got made into island the covers subsumed me I was there in the middle an organic mass a whole made up of stuff island is incremental the bed is the island of the room the girl is the island of the bed the heart is the island of the chest I’d hold mine a little to the left

go under the covers and have them against me all the way up to my head and be the part of island that hides underneath its water I let it consume me because I felt ashamed our votes were almost never based on actual fact but they did create the way we viewed things and more the progression of the night no kid is an island but me I was alone in that bed I was no longer with my sister not with my cousins and it was

normal for an adult to come upstairs “to check” but an island can be anything sometimes my hand on my chest sometimes my tongue in my mouth sometimes the now in what’s next sometimes the strange part of Adult that sticks out onto which

one has to sit O Bedtime we measure island by where we put our eyes but you return in tides and as for me yeah like a chicken to a tree I climb into you to sleep

Sunny Butterfield is a poet and nanny from Atlanta, Georgia. She is currently a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, where she is Poetry Editor of Bat City Review.