No need to cry

Doll-face. I'm just right here.

Feel a thing left

As the bird wouldn't stop fretting outside the window. The whole time I was putting pieces of the wall inside a plastic bag, testing the ceiling for holes. I know you'd like me to go now. This child's toy, thick with dirt. Don't look at me. I was not the one to leave it.

Now where I did get to

Call it, “Room of tormented light”
And let a bee-sting’s persistence substitute for sex.

The way this wall buckles. I mean the way it crumbles.
Makes room for plants to grow, like the way I call for you

At night when I’m thirsty and there is no one
Must wear an oxygen mask, Mama, to handle this plaster

Lavender, cream, and rose colors of childhood
All split in seams and faded, I gather into a plastic bag

Sit on the top dusty step with my bare white legs
And look down through cracked glass, unafraid here—

Later grazing on frozen raspberries in my underwear.
Gold seeds wedged in graves between my teeth.

Haven't been there for so long

Here means this, means his, means hers. So here is where a heart and how the arms cross. Here is hands on hips. Hello and welcome. I’d like to challenge. Take from me, I take from you. Balance toward giving. That mother’s muscles were beyond belief. That girl just starting breasts. I put my arms above my head. I aimed a camera in the dark. I cannot find it all here. Such as, goats tied with ragged sisal. One alone wore a bell, like a tongue making hollow. Charcoal of closed fires. Inelegant snorts of hippopotamus’ on the night shore. A palm-sized spider crawled across the wall in the same room in which I had to sleep and made the lake an ocean. Everything does come back to be about the body. Because we cannot not imagine what it means to be touched: to be told here, to ask for here. How many things will I try. Someone or something gave me here. Now everyday, how don’t I drop it.

Hard to know the difference

One is an eye, its scrunched up lashes, the other, between-the-legs. It’s all about not seeing: utilize the frame. Such as, these screens look casual against the bedroom wall, their flimsy metal imagining where else a window could be. Don’t bother to fit them. Don’t block the breezes. The ceiling gets hot to the touch. Ice cube melted on a clavicle. I write a poem about a specific, small town cemetery I traveled to with a friend. The horse-fly that touched my bare stomach there. Memory weight of its glitzy body, stitched into the scene. I drink a little too much when we get to the bottom. Ferns like sea foam an exterior. Clash against my third-hand, rose-dust, oriental rug. I mean I live with. Always taking off her shirt. Whose shirt? My own. The screen is good for a hot day. Used to push my tongue against before supper. And an uneven grid on my cheek. I traced it like a scar the skin would briefly accept. Fingered its fade. Waited for someone to call my name.

Everyone still alive say "Aye"

Jesse’s pony ran off during the uncles’ early firework’s display. Promise he’ll come back. I picked up the hot end of the sparkler, the darker end, thinking the part that shined would be the burn, though I’d repeatedly been told otherwise. Betsy cut a leaf off her aloe and I quit my crying. Held its milky gel to my palm-sear. Got another can of red pop, still sniffling, refusing to join my sister and the cousins. “Always making yourself the outsider. You can go play.” I wanted to sit on somebody’s lap. For Betsy to put her sharp drink down and carry me under the clothesline, singing “Ba-by An-na.” I couldn’t quit keeping away from the others, though it made me sad. Like an invisible string I couldn’t explain or cross, but I knew it was there. How long the sky stayed light then, but gradually like our faded sheets, wash after wash, in reverse came the darkness. So sparklers and cigarette ends could more fiercely glow, and voices louder, ice in the bucket, everyone I knew still accounted for, save Jesses’s pony, far out to neighboring pastures, where he was trained never to go. A few more drinks and everyone forgot, watched the sky, swatted mosquitoes, made love, or fell asleep or threw fists. So I came to see that in time, even he would be forgiven.

Old fashioned communication

I practice my handwriting at the window, but only one line, and on shreds of tape: One of the things he did for me One of the things he did for me One of the things— At some point, the earliest lip of exhaustion, hand or heart alters: …he did to me the new, finishing thought. I’m layering the tape to the seat of the three-spoke chair. I’m piling it with years’ old apple cores. Some bear my teeth marks and some bear yours, but so shriveled you’d never know. It is hard work. I drink a lot of water. I want to rest, when suddenly, two things happen: outside the screen a blue balloon, just out of reach. When it dips below the roof I run downstairs, catch the string that’s tangled in the flowering tree. The end’s weighed with a firecracker like a little scroll, a message without a message, which in a sense is more. I tug the balloon behind me, stop to check the mail and find an envelope you’ve marked, $47. It’s out of my hands. Almost laugh. The balloon is covered with rain, and shy like a strange animal. Inside it feels its way along the ceiling, creeping to the farthest slanted corner, and stops. We sit regarding one another. At which point I realize, I haven’t said a word all day. I think of Bennet in Mbita who writes, consistently, Why so quiet friend? I don’t know how to begin. It’s getting dark. The balloon string and its firecracker nuzzle the chair’s remaining spokes.