He is a black and white photograph
A sweet sweater peeking above collarbone
He looks right at me
As if we know joy and pain in the same way
He steps out of still-frame
out of memory
He is alive
He raises his right palm and he asks me
if I would like to dance
I am no longer me
I am a child
I am my best friend
My sister
and I am also me,
A trinity
He smiles as he twirls all of us, as one
A record player needle
across vinyl
pulling tune and tone from bottom to top
across a kiddy sticky floor
What is this?!?!
We are annoyed to have our soles(souls)
Pulled down from heel
Take your shoes off
Now we are in sand
on Loon, rather than a high-school atrium
He stands at the end of the dock
Italian.Tall. Floating.
A superhero
He sweeps his cape over
the sun room
Like the moon
He whispers to me
"Remember the depths of intimacy,
Do not let yourself get in the way. Please remind my family."
And he looks at me, I am still sister, best friend, me
I pull my knees up to chest
As he leaves
he releases a belly laugh
about how he flushed the ****** down the septum tank
And how he would pay to hear Damien curse over the course of that.

Her crumbs cascade waxy wood floor
I breath
Can I function intentionally?
My hand rests on my chest
I dig my fingertips into collarbone
I count
the way I was taught as a child
1...2...3
I am still here
Before my daughter goes to bed
she begs me to read books about Mr. & Mrs. Elmo and whales and Mrs. Doubtfire
I cannot protect her from false fathers
Imbalanced teeter totter parenting.
A genetically predisposed man who wakes up and occasionally chooses to hold her
I trained my heart to let go of tucked in promises
and Disneyland Dad ego strokes
I hope she views his love like an orange window at sunset
I won't let the line to the ride even be created.
She will be okay.
I echo this.
I bite every layer of cheek
Awake and asleep
Her mother is instinct
No choice is involved
It's almost as if I felt her every hiccup
in womb
every twirl and spill and swallow
I beg the orbits of hemisphere
to protect her from her father's contrast
Planted pink egg
faltered *****
a fingerprint.
When she opens her lids and voice
It is only her
Not her mother
Not her father
She is exquisite.
She is Audrey.

My bed is only messed up by me,
Diagonally.
Sleep is an ambush
Soldiers gunning at my eyelids
They quiver while natural light
stuffs iris barrels with daisy
If only I could create my own field of weeds

Will man remain my enemy?

I dare a mustache to balk
at my bush
For there are no eyes
No kiss
No tooth
In my world
Declaring how a woman should be in her *****
I grip the shadows of every fold
Every eery layered mattress
held in nuptial tandem
Right side of the bed or left?

Stinging and menacing, they remind me
That I am stone
Only the most desolate sleep on me
No crack in the river? No mother?
I remain gray and bayside
Crack me open to find lavender clouds
drifting above sweaty skyline
An agate,
A gem of a woman
Treated like a skipping stone
That is me
I will become the ocean before that is my identity

I lick my wounds with
a sorbet sunset tongue
A slurp so icy thick and orange that it covers elephant horizons
My pain---a mirrored cloud skyscraper
it is king to
Grief
A planet where there are never enough parking spaces
If you find a place to rest
it will cost you an over- romanticized sensory memory
and then you will never be able to sleep again
I took up space
Decided I would sing among the meadows
Black filled my cracks and
my clothes started to wear me.
Everyone tries to hug me
They start their sentences with a dry, choking,  "at least."
I start to resent strangulation
Oxygen is my mother
She shows up and holds my hands tenderly,
rubbing her fingertips over my nail beds
I beg her to stay
to swaddle me and morph me into ten-year-old-me
She just murmurs, "me too."
"I want that too."

Could I be cotton?
Or the light that fills checkered New York cockroach apartments?
Could I be anything but a woman who is grieving over a black shelled conman?

With your hands you transform rainbows
that have arched from the earth
You bare down, even in the fervor of summer's firing flame
To consecrate recipes that are born by the grit of the soil, not by nursing mother
Your loved ones raise hands and bounce up and down,
begging to be invited around your wooden table
and feast with fierce female culinary queen,
and her doting family

Grief is a burly man
He has been shoveling manure since he was ten
His shoulders carry the **** of the world
His nostrils smell earth's fertilizer as rose
Even when we are plugging our noses and declaring offensive
Not me, though
I will sit next to him and braid **** in his hair, and then mine
I will be tempted to have him put wildflower petals on lumps of excrement
Am I a lady clothed in rose

Should I blame my father?
Is that who is at fault?
A man with a salty cobalt smile
A felon, turned male siren
Bringing every oak fortress
to her shipwrecking death
The wind, never able to drown out
Every sailor weeping, "How did we not know???"
If only we could remain children forever
blaming our parents and dissolving our sins from theirs
I want him to be in the court house
I want him to sign my name with a blue ink pen
I want him to paint midnight  on my eyelids
the way he did my mother's
I want to swallow every lump in my throat and purge it onto him
I hope he never washes the stains from his collar bone
Maybe then he could beat the yellow out of me
instead of her
Yellow
Blue
Black
The way the sun seems to set
But our generation of women have never been settled

How did I not know.

How did I not know.

That your smile would be my pearly gate to hell
That your ***** would produce my God--
The most gorgeous curly headed goddess to ever step foot on this planet
You will try to take her from me
I will never let you
You will try to stain her iris from blue to green
Her sapphire spirit will never be boxed by you
She will be the fortress that you cannot take down
Like a mine field
She will blow you up and I will collect the bones
You will starve me for years
I will fast even longer
I am her mother.