Have I

told you that

I think about us

like juju-bee-thick-cloud rain–

Like my blue lightning

veins always

knew you?

Like you

traversed cold

river stones– held rocks

between your your toes like pistols–

emmersed your pockets

with pebbles

like me?

In the streets of dance the trees seek

tap shoes in the soil– entangled in dandy lion roots.

break them loose with cruets of oil–

slither out like strawberry worms–

on their own turns– flamenco on the crosswalk

tell us to wait– tell us there is rain and

air gaits like canned pudding–

put hair gel to hold up their branches

like punk rockers and mayonnaise–

put back their tap shoes

after forty days and forty afternoons to grow

spring tulips with wonky necks.

 

I’ll set a path of bread crumbs

for us to find our way back.

You can be my brother or

my lover or my father or

my dead grandmother who

fed me hard candy from crystal bowls

–kept purse peppermints.

I know that the breeze and the gasps

of gods will take the bread crumbs away–

Scatter them to seas like wedding petals

or business cards.

If you are my brother you will eat

the trial behind us because he likes rye bread.

If you are my lover you will

wonder where the crumbs led and collect

the remaining pieces in a back pocket–

trying to fasten a topoiographic map of a person

who keeps stale bread to pin-down memories.

If you are my father you will

tell me that snapping turtles ate

the bread crumbs– and that there

was never really a path. I had just

made up my past from images

in other people’s photo albums.

If you are my grandmother

you will say it’s good that I dropped

the bread crumbs. It is good to remember

something– even if there’s nothing

left to remember.

And she’ll crunch ice cream cones in

the corner at night

in the chair from her old apartment– thinking about

sourdough and English muffins.

If you are me you will leave bread crumbs.

You will get lost

on the way to gingerbread houses.

Climb in ovens.

Sleep in warmth.

set a path of bread crumbs

for us to find our way back.

Set me on fire like orange creamsicles.
I was always sherbet
on sticky fingers
making sewage pools 
on hot pavement. I feed the ants
that crawl under my skin-- under 
my bed sheets-- weak waves
of centipede's uncoiling fingers.
When I'm burned thin-- tangerine skin--
scrape up my ashes that have become
blue and red and bruise pastels
rub them on the forehead of a
stranger in the sign of a cross.
Say "In the name of my mother
and her mother and saint clare
who cut her hair"
Tell them how many sunsets
they have been.
How many layers of tire rubber
they have worn down.
Tell them how they are the erosion 
that breaks rocks off mountains.
Tell them they are both fire
and palm branch soot. My grandfather
fell off a train in a flourish of steam
and died and his daughter never forgot.
I take that train to the beach each summer.
I drink nectar from plastic tubes.
I set fire to my wrists
because they look like
bug bites.
I used to light eight matches
before lighting the candles in the church
as an acolyte
just to smell fire in the threads
of a white robe
smeared with pastels.  

Sometimes I forget
I haven't always known you.

I met you like we all met things like cake
icing and sprinkles and the birth of daffodils
in the late March that roar
in the strangled throat of Winter.

I imagine that first time I licked 
frosting from the pleated skirt 
of a cupcake I might have
thought it was shaving cream
bubble bath or a snowman's beard--
tasted boxed yellow cake
that has always said "i love you"
more ardent than a hurricane.

I thought sprinkles might grow 
from a bush like spearmint leaves--
maybe I discovered wildflowers and thought
they were spearmint leaves
thought the bells of daffodils were
antique telephones-- tried to call
you from the voice of a two-year-old.

You tell me you want to befriend 
a hurricane so you can know its eye.

I love you like the stillness of air
before a thunder storm in July when
God drops Blitzkrieg buckets on us to watch
us dance--
undressed--
unfurled porch flags--
no longer waiting for an arch
to take us away two-by-two.

We wait for the eye. 

I keep telling myself
I'll stop writing love poems
for boys, for windowsills, and for 
warm coves between pancakes.

Each pivot of my
ankles is a pen-line in
the blue-lined notebook 
page of dawn-- you wrap
me like the redline
encircle my legs 
with the metal spiral bind. 

I don't want to stop writing
i love you
with mascara in mirror mist
in the labyrinths of my thumb
prints pressed-- hold the back
of you neck
like a warm mug of peppermint
tea.

I love you with persistent
nights and forgotten mornings
lost in the cores of my 
Macintosh apples.

I love you across 
inside-out socks.
Across windowsill ledges.
Across cardboard endings
of notebooks that always 
come too soon. 

Collect

pollen on

your eyebrows. Chalk dust

outlines underneath carpets.

 We breath like windows.

Unlock

our door for

me. Like someone was

waiting.Carve your name in crayon.

Write letters with lip-

prints patient

on glass.

Bury me in a kelp forest

body to lay in the limp arms of the almost elms.
they harbor timid fins of lion fish.
i won't sink- i won't float.
i will be a park ranger to
give tours to seals and orphan
egg sacks attempting flight.
there will be a kind of silence that makes us
forget that there was ever sound.
the kelp moves without lips.
no teeth.
chews on the sun.
marinades me like stuffed grape
leaves- oil tongues.
i think about terrestrial forests.
i think about soil toes.
i think about red hawks.
i think about worms cut in two.
i think about aerial views
from airplanes and red hawks
when they fly above the canopy.
i think of the top of my head
as a dot on a bingo board.
pocket engorged with acorns
and smooth stones.
i imagine the kelp forest
has rivers and voles under the sand.
i remember how i had always tried
to get lost in forests- disorient 
myself.
i reject the trail.
i don't float, i don't sink.
I turn.
the tree behind me is nothing but
a mirror of those in front of me.
I bubble beat-breath.
I sleep.
I sleep in the limp arms of the kelp.
i float. i sink.

March bleeds me like the mud puddles 
of water color palettes 
between fifth graders who
try to make flowers that don't look like pinwheels-- 
soaking up mucky-lilacs 
with brown paper towels.
quaking cold-- pinwheel hair out station wagon windows 
I decided that I could stop 
wearing scarves long enough 
to feel the must of daffodil breath on my brow.
A screenless open window.
The older I get the more I realize
that Spring is as much of a beginning
as Fall is an end-- I'm not the
girl who rubbed April from her
eyes last year-- wore snow boots
and ate cheerios from plastic baggies.
Grass grows like the hair on my
ear lobes. Like moss on my heels.
Humans have always found something
in the rain-- only to realize we 
don't need to be washed to be reborn--
we made a symbol so we could pretend
we knew that we were changing.
And then it was summer.
And then we were humid.
And then we were cold. 

I try not to let myself forget that I'm not the only collage of a person.
Taped-glued-rubber-cemented fragments of a past that we all shared
and all forgot and all remembered again together when
we read about it in the headlines or in the want ads for
lost tabby cats named ginger.

I am not the only person to ever be broken and neither are you. I won't
lie to you and tell you that I ever was more than a flower girl
at a backyard wedding who didn't want to throw
rose petals because she wanted them for herself-
so the wind coughed them into the grass for her to gather again.

I gather most nights up like the perfumed scabs of roses.
I used to think I only made collages on Sunday nights-- I am 
a collection of Sunday nights and the sublime stupor of magazine
article titles that I don't read because the headline is always
better than the book-- tattoo my spine with call numbers.

I make collages because I'd rather be the artist of my own recovery
than the approximation of someone else's. I'm not a sculpture. I'm 
not a work of art. I'm the third grade Elmer's gilded compiling
of breaths of god and places other humans have bled out my sides
-or places I've made my own flower crowns of thorn. 

I am not the only anthology of broken beautiful pieces.
If you ever thought that one of use was ever whole- you 
were standing too far back-- look into the 'o' of my
Open eyes and see the 'o' of obituaries- we were all born
like the throwing of an antique vase onto the red-tile floor.

mosaic memories. juggernaut galleries. broken and unbroken 
parts of a whole.