What do you want to be when you grow up?

 

I had a dream last night I had a daughter. Girls talk about having nightmares of having babies or being pregnant I’ll tell you this wasn’t one of them. I don’t want a daughter, I don’t know if I would call myself a mother, and I don’t know if I ever will but this wasn’t a nightmare.

I gave birth in the quiet darkness of my closet and there were striped sweaters in my face. I remember being scared to hold her. I wanted her to love me. I brushed her forehead with my thumb and told her that she would never be understood for everything that she felt– that she would spend every day in explanation. That we all do. She smelled like coconut oil.

I told her it wasn’t sad. I told her it was fun to find new ways to try to approximate what you were each day. I told her photographs would always look funny because they never remembered what you did from that moment.

I told her that I knew the world would break her but that the same world would put her back together with push-pins and sticky notes. I told her she would cry enough to fill tea kettles.

I told her I didn’t want to name her because I didn’t know what she would want to be called. I told her we could pick one together. I didn’t see what she looked like because the closet was dark and when I tried to settle myself into a kneeling position she started to cry.

I remember being scared that someone would open the door– that someone would interrupt us there. That someone would find out I had had a daughter in my closet and take her away and tell me that she wasn’t mine.

I set her in the corner next to my green yoga mat. I told her I would be back for her each night and that no one would touch her but me if she didn’t want.

I told her she could leave if she wanted to.

I kissed her index finger.

I shut the door.

 

Times I have neglected to thank my mother.

1. I am the head chef. I wear an apron that I trip over because it’s twice the size of me. Like a ball gown– like a wedding dress. I conduct my mother sous chef with a wooden spoon. I sneak nutmeg in the chicken soup as the special ingredient and the she tell our studio audience it’s delicious even though it tastes like rotisserie pumpkin pie.
2. I am the hat shop owner and I keep my business exclusively to my father. I tell her I love her but that I want to play with daddy today. She smiles and makes grilled cheese. She watches from the room over and beams like a pot of stew.
3. I am the tamer of the wind out the car window. I say “hello,” and it always talks back.
4. I am the Cantus song on repeat.
5. I am the longer side of a split soft pretzel on the way home from grandmom’s when we both want to be nothing but pillow cases.
6. I am soap on wrists.
7.  I am lady bug finger nails on the front porch on a night in June after she’d come home from work.
8. I am aluminum swans full of leftovers.
9. I am stuffed hedgehogs and owls named after philosophers.
10. I am a green beret.
11. I am patience of feet on a gravel path in August with nothing but corn husks between us and hands smaller than my own that hoist crock pots into dinners.
12. I am Mutzu apples and banana bread and times she has made me soup I’ve been too scared to eat.
13. I am daughter who writes poems and doesn’t say “I love you enough”.
14. I am an approximation of apricot scones.
15. I am the lull after the television goes silent and the night sits waiting for someone to speak.
16. She is the squares of an unfinished quilt that I’ve never needed because she’s woven quiet love into every single day. She is not a saint story but every mother is a saint Monica– moving each morning aside like a stack of papers.

I remember a time when I didn’t think of food in numbers.

1. I stand at the kitchen counter and break cinnamon-raisin bagels like communion hosts– handing halves to my brother and keeping the fluffy bottom for myself.
2. I sit crisscross applesauce on the beach towel with the blue flowers by the side of Kutztown pool. I dunk scalding fries in to a cup of orange cheese, swarmed by my neighbor’s anxious chloride fingers– we eat like pass over. We peel off sesame seeds from the caps of cheeseburgers– we wipe ketchup from our thumbs.
3.  I kneel before the altar of a blueberry bush and the bell sounds the first time in the wind chimes, the second in  the rustle of the trees at the base of the hill, and the third from the beaks of crows catching sunlight glints in their eyes from the streamers of aluminum that stand guard around the parameters of the field. I eat warm blueberries and think about nothing but the coo of the breeze and the comfortable feeling that your stomach is a pillow of fruit you picked yourself.
4. The number of baskets we brought with us.
5. The number of berries that fit in the palm of my hand when I was ten.
6. The number of calories in a hand full of blueberries.
7. Each cheeseburger bun has about 140 calories and each sesame seed we plucked might have removed just one.
8. The number of cheese fries I ate that were probably at least 350 calories
9. The number of bagels in the bread box. Divide 250 by two and get the number of calories in each cinnamon raisin bagel bottom.
10. I want to peel off the numbers like the stickers on red delicious apples at gas stations but I see them under my eyelids. They crawl over my skin like gnats around a blue berry bush.
11. Now I eat blue berries like the decades of a rosary– lined up in serving sizes of ten– promises between my fingers.
12. Our father who art in heaven hallowed be they name.
13. I’ll call it a luminous mystery and turn six stone jugs of water into wine.

Let’s drink our coffee

from soup spoons.

Eat soup like a spool

from cold forks.

Drink cool sink water

from lotion palms.

Eat marmalade toast

from end tables.

Drink ginger-zest tea

from coach arms.

Eat lazy morning

from tile floors.

Drink hesitant nights

from windows.

My blood has contained the fragile arms of snow flakes.

My blood has melted into the Red Sea

slid down the gullet of dairy  cows laying down before

a storm

washed the rocket-ship bed sheets

of my brother.

My blood has flooded main street

in a bursting July lightning storm

that cracks the sky like a speckled egg

boiled to steep British breakfast tea

and escaped from the kettle in pearls.

My blood has baked peanut-butter brownies

at two a. m.

coiled in the bellies of water balloons

washed the crumpled paper hands of the priest

before communion– pouring from the distracted

pitcher of the bell acolyte.

I am nothing more than red food coloring

and milk.

My hips and my wrists sleet and rain like martyr throats

and thorn bush thumbs.

My blood has cascaded in waterfalls in the Amazon

and waited stagnant in the brewing

Pine Barrens.

When I bleed I hail, I drizzle, I flurry, I rain

I wash baby hair and apostle feet.

I have already been an ocean– it is not much

to be a girl who drenches herself

in July rain and cracks her skin

like speckled eggs.

When I became a poet I sold my black heels.

The ones that clink like a cubicle.

I sold my pillow creases, the edges of my blankets,

and the chips of black nail polish from my thumb.

When I became a poet I sold my shed eye lashes.

The ones I drop in front of the mirror each morning.

I sold my apple cores, my hot-pocket commercials,

and my extra shoe laces.

When I became a poet I sold my favorite sweater.

The one with the blue cupcakes on it.

I sold my purple head band, my jelly bracelets

and my peppermint chap stick.

Oatmeal.

My eyes are quiet lockets in the morning– still dangling around my neck. I blink like the hesitant clapping of hands after a song is ended. Each morning I pour the oats into the bowl and think about how they look like golf-fish scales or shaved edges of dead Christmas trees. Each morning I pour the hot water from the puckered mouth of the tea kettle who whistles a tune that sounds like whatever nursery rhyme I had dreamed about. I sing along and let the pot murmur to itself off the heat. Each morning I pour cinnamon on the surface of the hot water– to disperse like the ashes of a thousands ships who tried to sail through a sea as thick as soil. And each morning I wait until the water in taken in by each grain of oat until the bowl is mushy-thick.

Slowly,

I enter with my spoon.

Each morning I make memories of grains and sing nursery songs about fish-scales.

Each morning I pour myself a bowl of oatmeal.

 

My father taught me words

my mother taught me saints.

Somewhere in between I learned to write words on my legs.

My father opened each chapter book like a paper back bible by my bedside while I begged him to preach the fires and stardust of distant tongues. I told him I could build a magic tree house and be a volunteer fire fighter. That I would make dragons from clay and feel helplessly at the back of my wardrobe for winter snow. I told him I’d make God a lion. I told him to read more when even the green tree-frog night light would flicker as if it had regressed into a candle. He dare never stop.

My mother talked about saints like distant cousins who we might meet at a wedding or a funeral reception at the same Italian place we always go to. She taught us we could bleed milk. My mother never preached– but she did make magic of martyr blood and I remember thinking how nice it would be to die for God and just go straight to heaven. I thought it was unfair because no one would ever throw me to lions.

Somewhere in between them I picked up a pen. I wrote stories from stick figures and prophecies on my squishy fourth-grade thighs in the shape of hearts and snippets of poetry I could not yet grasp.

My father taught me words.

my mother taught me saints.

And in between a writer emerged– bleary-eyed and kneeling before the glory that is the black words.

My joints are mortars and pestles

that make a fine powder of sage and thyme–

times I have tasted tamarack

in the turning

morning– taken by the sumac

syrup in my lungs–

breathe in the thin dust of the season–

seasoning my bones for the goulash–

grinding for the gumbo– I want to be

consumed in the calamitous combinations

of a soup with sprigs of parsley that float

like hair pins.

Swallow me slow from the cove-belly

of the spoon.

I am alphabet soup with only As and Qs

contaminated with curry

that stain the bowl a sulfur mustard yellow.

Stir the pot with my femurs.

Drink careful from the rim of

my skull.

When I describe him my words escape into the lingering mist after the rain– my love makes art from his breath and leaves water colors in his foot prints.

He is thoughtful like the coiled necks of daffodils. He is spirited like the stepping by the sink that’s always waiting. He’s the smirk of the skyline on a night in May that feels like August. He is as lighthearted as rainbow sprinkles caked onto melting vanilla soft serve.

This morning I’m approximating proof of a God with his existence– what a God to make so much from silt and clay.

In the folds of his hands he formed my love– a kitchen counter prophet– a late night show philosopher.

He paints me with watercolors and kisses me like daffodil petals.