My mother is getting ready for work. And I am a child of about 9 years old sitting on her bedroom floor watching her get dressed the same as I would for the next 9 years or so in this house. The house that I remember then use to shake violently from the train a block away and was so glass-fragile and so cold-damp that its walls warped and swelled; making it look like someone had once blown up a large balloon inside of it and the walls curved around it. Even after that balloon popped the walls never managed to regain their original shape. My mother who never complained about the state of our home and in fact rather fancied it would tell me “Isn’t it cozy living in a snow-globe shaped house, and when it shakes we can pretend we’re snowmen in a glass ball.” She would always say things like that. I would always listen; I would always sit quietly with my legs tucked under my *** and watch my mother get ready for work. She would go through the same motions she went through every night and every night in the same order, she did this so often and religiously she had it down to an art, a methodical system of movements that at this age seemed to me more like dancing. I would watch as her dance started in her hands. Her fingers thumbing over the light pale and pink lip paints she saved for weekday afternoons and for Sunday mornings. She instead reached for the bright Chinese red stick she painted onto her perfectly pursed lips. She then reached for her black dress, pressing down the wrinkles smooth as the backs of thumb-tacks, smoothing the fabric over her hips, her thighs, her legs. Next she would sashay over to her vanity, pick up a small container and spread over her eyelids a bright but dusty blue shadow. I love this next part. When she would gently sweep me up and sets me on her bed as she knelt down and told me to sprinkle her face with a shimmery clear powder, giving her the look she always said made her stand out, made her look “unique”. I always thought she looked like she was in the caught in the middle of a snow-globe. Her next step was then slipping her dainty and fragile size 7 feet into heels that I knew would look invisible in the dark night outside our front door, she would look like she was almost floating. I often thought those would hurt her feet as she walked that long stretch of street outside our house.  Her arms then would sway and flick her hands outward, grasping with all her fingers a purple and gold glass bottle of perfume on her dresser. Back then it looked to me like a curious crystal globe of sweet-smelling water that turned sparkly when she shook it. This is my mother’s last step, she presses down the sponge-like pump. I really love this part. The only magical part of my mother’s evening- the part I always thought would make her realize she should stay. As she presses down on the pump I see the shiny and clear purple hued liquid release and bubble out into tiny specks of oxygen atoms, I watch them as they swirl up the golden bottle-the rounded glass holding them in, controlling them, allowing them to eddy and ebb around themselves, to tango around each other within the safety of its bottle. They are dancing, writhing around in their own world, free from the terrors of the outside air, these atoms embrace the chaos and they wallow in the pressure that perpetuates them in an endless looping of rhythmic motion. They enjoy it. They bask in the comfort of the fluid that holds them tight together safe in their glass house, keeping them untouched. I, sitting there eye level to this bottle watching ever so closely as the air bubbles swim closer and closer to the surface until they slowly start to realize that they are being expelled from their bottle. Then they stop dancing and move franticly in a tornado-like motion, they scream and they fight their way back down towards the others like them, wishing to not be pushed up and out into the bigger pool of air they know will surely render them invisible. They wish so strongly to be kept inside their glass world, to always be safe and visible in the enwombing liquid that circles around them in their bottle that reassures them of their existence as a single being and not as a part of a whole. To be separate from the mass of air that awaits them, the air that only yearns to add to its girth, by swallowing the tiny air-bubbles. I want them to stay. Stay in their snow-globe and live forever as air bubbles safe and few, to not swim up to the world that will gulp them down whole. I know they are dainty and fragile and I want to keep them safe. I want to always see them dancing separate and unique and never leaving, yet they do. I want them to stay, yet they do not. All in an instant, faster than the blink of an eye, the once dancing bubbles are gone and are now sprinkled sweet across my mother’s neck. The only evidence of their existence- a lingering scent flowing out of my mother’s bedroom as she grabs her purse off the couch. I want her to stay too. And as she grabs her bag and slams the front door it shakes our house like glass around me. I remember a younger me, left there feeling liquid and weak in a snow-globe house now void of air.

I dreamt that I wrote to you last night. I woke up with paper cuts in between my fingers, lemon juice that stained my bed a ****-yellow color, ink embedded underneath my fingernails,  and every time I reached down to scratch my ***** I left a shameful line of old black ink. I think I’d have mailed it to her if I knew that when she read it she would scream with a horrid realization. A realization of finally understanding the monster she use to sleep next to, before the **** sheets before the ink stained boxers. I’d have mailed it to her if it wasn't just in my dreams. I imagine that the lines in my letter were laced with layers of lucid logic that stringed together feelings that con-caved in on themselves. That ate themselves whole;  but instead of making them disappear entirely they grew twice their size and spilled over the pages and underneath my nails. The diction I imagine I would have chosen to write with would be read with a southern twang.  Slow and drawn out. She would have to read it with extra syllables that her tiny lungs could not possibly hold. It would make her choke, for the first time, on words that weren't her own. My words would finally fulfill the dreams of my hands; constantly wanting to ring around her neck like I was seven again on the playground and her name was Rosie. I wouldn't have rhymed in my subconscious, to me that always seems fake and I can’t really rhyme without having my voice break. I might, however; use from time to time red bold words laying in the middle of long paragraphs in hopes she would remember her red dress. Of how, before bed, it grazed over her slopping neck and slid off onto my floor. In my dream it’s still on my floor. I hope in my letter that I wrote out a picture of her seeing me seeing her put it on in front of our window the next morning and even though that dress was too short for autumn and she would wear it anyway. Because she knew it drove me crazy and because she wanted to remember me even after she walked out my front door. Mornings like that I begged her stay even if we had just fought over how much she snores, even if I had called her a **** one too many times the drunken night before. My letter, I think, would tell her that I wish she didn't have to bundle up and leave that she could instead cut up my bed sheets and make herself a new warmer dress. One that would have matched my pillow too perfectly for her to not lay her head on it and call it a hat. For her to pretend that my bed was the world outside the door. My letter would go like that. It would make her scream at first then make her remember that monsters can love too and knowing that; she would punch her new mattress and tear up her new pillows ones that I have never touched. She would scream, "*******!" preceding my name every time she landed a blow. She would say that so many times that she could never look at her new bed again without thinking of me, and of ****. When I dreamt last night I dreamt I wrote you a letter, but dreams don’t have hands that can hold pens. So I instead sent you my bed sheets, my boxers, I signed them with lemon juice and old black ink. Wear them, sleep with them, read them for what they are worth or toss them out because monsters with words like mine give you nightmares.

If we could escape this heat
I think we would.
With a choice of geography I could see us somewhere cold,
Somewhere where our hands couldn't touch
Anything but the inside of gloves
Where our hearts wouldn't break with our fevers
Because only our memories would know what it was
Like to always be so hot.
We would never sweat next to each other
We wouldn't dare to.
We would know that each bead that dripped down our brow
Would harden into a marble, and we would never
Throw those stones at one another.
Besides, we never be so close to one another anyway
Not with our layers of fabric hugging our bodies so tight
That we would eventually forget what was underneath
And only recognize the form of each other by the patterns on our jackets
We wouldn't see each other as anything other than
A pile of laundry.
The site of piled clothing would not remind of us nakedness
But of how it felt to lay as children
Underneath a freshly dried pile of garments.
How we would feel the warmth as good at first but were then
Deceived by a burning hot brass button
That puckered the skin on the back of our
Necks, of our legs.
We could remember heat as heartbreak in our
Memories and it would be too far erased to ever recreate.
We could live for the cold, the sharp air
That would still the boiling liquids in our veins
That  once made our hearts beat too vulnerable to not be hurt.
Our core would adapt to the cold
And it would harden our hot feeling and small morsels
Of memories together like a bag of peas in a freezer.
We can’t be so hot.
Not you and me, not together.
Not with mouths so dry from each others
Our bodies would have to make water for us.
Not with heads so full of steaming blood that feelings melted and
Swished together in a liquid until they were no longer distinguishable
As real things and were often  so misunderstood
We added more liquid dilutions
Until they filled our bodies too full
They spilled out of eyes and burnt our faces.
We should move somewhere cold
Where everything is too solid to connect anything
And too still to break our hearts.

It would behoove my grade school bible teacher to know, that I have finally found Jesus. He sits alone at my neighborhood bar and in a fashion that is not unlike the line at a New York City Jewish deli shop, he takes questions. Ticket number 347, “What kind of man will I marry?” ticket number 7623,”When will the end of days come?” My bible study class oh, how they would shake inside their buttoned blouses with envy that I was the one to find Jesus, between drink, between cigarettes, with beer and peanut excrements on bottoms of his sandals. Handing out answers like pork cutlets to mouths that haven’t eaten in years because they have filled up on the appetizer that is stomach churning worry. The gutless and gutful sin of having problems without the hope of solutions that shakes believers so hard in the night they fall off their beds and land conveniently on their knees. They wake up in the morning with bruises and scratches, another problem but this time the solution is simple. A mixture of peroxide and cotton-blend Band-Aids, hugging tight stinging cuts until the next day when the Band-Aid is loose and falls off into meat grinders making sausage links you don’t even have the appetite for. I found Jesus in a bar. When I see him I remember Sunday school and how I stood up on the sweaty palm pulpit and yelled, “He is not real!” and now confronted with my falseness I wonder if I was wrong to try to cool off the fire in my belly that was unanswered questions by answering them myself. I took a ticket. I stood in line. I waited as the knot my grade school teach tied with my intestines tightened itself and pulsated with the influx of another beer and growing bowel movements that only made me more unsure of the source of pain in my belly. I watched as Jesus nodded politely in between admissions of sins and proposals of betterment like his neck was the waist of a Hawaiian ******* the dashboard of a Colorado trucker, or like aged fast-food wrappers that tilt forward with the inertia caused by strategically placed speed bumps.  Each nod, a mini-bow that seemed to contradict his devotion to his divinity and his authority over the bleeding kneed and hungry stomached servants. I am the last ticket before the last call and I take advantage of both. Being this close I can see sweat stains under his arms, my mother would say they are extra halos. “And your question, my child?” he says, and I think I should have been more prepared or at least not stuttered like the elementary school student stuck playing Pluto in the graduation play. “Was I wrong that day on the pulpit?” It was rudely put. I was embarrassed. He said, “Did it ease the hunger pain of uncertainty?” It did. “Then no, you answered your own question.” He seemed drunk at that point when he said that, so I trusted it as a sober man’s thoughts. Then I walked away full and knees unscathed.

I remember the places I used to hide
My feelings locked away
With no one to find the key
Waiting for Mr. Right
But he won’t come
So I’ll settle for Mr. Right Now,
Mr. In the moment,
Mr. Can I take your coat off
Just to see your skin
So I can picture you naked
Full of regret, full of hatred
I do as he wishes
He slips off my coat
Along with my self-respect
My shirt follows and so does my hope
Passion and desire, meaning more than one night.
Now the pants, the bra, the shoes
Like tinny vessels,
A disappearing bruise
And with my last cloth of hope stripped away
My heart and mind meet at that place where they
Know That Mr. Right won’t come. He won’t show.
Because with my self-respect, my hope, it’s gone in the midst
My mind tells my heart that he doesn’t exist

To my father time,
my keeper of clocks whose minute hand
never clicks too fast for my growing mind,
whose hand was always held out to help me over curbs
and over mountains
Leading me to the path he’d knew I needed to walk down the most.
To the gray hair I loved to brush through as a child, with paintbrush fingers
and as an adult discreetly smell with each long, over due hug.
To the man I loved first and the one I give thanks for
every last thanksgiving.
The one whose eyes held the same color as mine
and when I looked into them saw I us both
picking flowers down the street
but father time
your eyes were always slightly different than mine
they had a touch of yellow that I could never,  in my own eyes find
but how I wanted that same hue of gold.
To be touched by your Midas eyes I thought I could uncover the world
but I can’t. You are too far away and I miss you
and I can no longer feel the warmth of those yellow specks
only the black of your pupils that are
deeper than the ocean and I am a fish without gills forever trying
to swim toward the orange light the sun yields each morning
only to be stuck in mud  
forever waiting  for your glowing second hand to touch me again each hour
and remind me to look for gold in blackness
and that I have the same eyes as yours, that can turn minute hands into
years of arms and mud into gold.

In the break of a storm
Rain acts like cars whizzing past pedestrian's faces
Blinking with watery head lights
And deafening horns of water-droplets
Beating on the heads of concrete drums
The wind like the underbelly of a lawn mower
With teeth, circular, sharp
and vicious enough to cut the point off blades
Of grass
When strong gusts blows
Hats off men’s heads
The stretch of jagged lightening
Mocks the warmth of yellow light
As its golden blade cuts through
The butter-soft black and blurry night
And the pruned weeds of people
That turn earth’s green brown
Count after the flash of light
So similar to the sun of daytime
They swore was there to brighten their world
1..2..3…
Thunder lets them know how fast the storms
Girth is approaching like
The rings inside a water cup tell you
Something bigger than yourself is walking towards you
It’s footsteps a voice that causes even the best intentioned daisy
To lose a petal or two.