Mating season, springtime resulted in a pale December pollywog in calm water.

This was the beginning.

I, perpetually long and overgrown, inevitably tore through the gelatinous orb around me.

One can’t stay a black dot forever.

Frenetic, limber, and impetuous-

I was amassed among countless other bullets darting upstream.

My rudimentary gills were not enough.

I got my first inhaler in the fourth grade.

The dirt embedded under my nails switched to blood.

Some tadpoles adapt and grow teeth to rip their cuticles off- if the trepidation becomes larger

than the salientian’s little body.

This was the middle.

gone were the calm waters.

I was waylaid from the clear rivers and thick mud caked my eyelids shut.

Much to my dismay, you could not rush a life cycle with the ease that you’d flip a record.

I yearned to shed my epidermis, I swatted at my chest, coward in crowds and grinded my teeth

down to snuff.

I waded in whiskey and bottles of Bowman’s.

At least as an awkward adolescent, I could look to any frog further along in the cycle and with a

tussle of the head, hear “you’re a good kid”

Oh, to be a pollywog with potential.

springs become summers, summers become autumns, and autumns become winters- bodies of water, frozen over.

I changed schools, medications, vices, but it seemed I could not surmount to transformation.

Amidst one particular stint of unvarying livelihood, two gangling webbed rods planted

themselves in the riverbed, shooting upwards with the ferocity of beansprouts.

Before the particles of dirt had even cleared from the murky water, I was scooped up, the beak of

a blue heron, and for a second of a waterlogged life upon the opening of the mandible, I caught a

glimpse of life beyond murky water

the birds mouth a reliquary for the pollywog during her transformation,

the heron, not a predator, but an acolyte.

My cramped dactyls shot from my limbless body.

I hopped from the beak into the suddenly clear water.

This is the end.

not of it all, but of not being true to the four-legged creature inside of me, who craves air as

much

as water.

This year I am effusive for my being.

This is the year of the frog.