My Grandmother’s Kitchen

On the cold counter

I sat dangling my bare feet.

“Be still” she had said.

I wasn’t the type to sit.

I was of green grass stained knees.

She was slicing carrots

and peeled off pastrami for

me like sticky notes.

I ate the peppered edges

same as the crust of grilled cheese.

 

Do we speak to who we were before or are we collected silhouettes?                                           We return to old benches to visit our neglected silhouettes.

Trace my outline in chalk on the road by my house in orange.                                                          I want to remember that I thought citrus peels were rejected silhouettes.

I’ll face the strands of hair from a girl who used to make pancakes                                            and cut herself in rows of square brownies like corrected silhouettes.

We lost that skin and grew different hair but we still know the bench.                                           We taste onion tears when we meet chocolate chips’ suspected silhouettes.

The stars under my finger nails will never fall like shredded newspaper.                                     How many of us have there been? A wax gallery of projected silhouettes.

He’ll call me Sarah with Hershey-kiss hair or that blueberry crew cut.                                         I’ll look up and wonder who he talks to of all my reflected silhouettes.

 

 

I Carry a Palette Like a Pocket Watch 

I found

love was made for paint

in palettes or pastels on

my thumbs– I smudge on

door knobs.

I love

you like maeve sometimes

when I house my morning in

chamomile honey

tea cups.

I’m green

like watermelon

stripes when I meet you in the

subway.

Egg shell

makes it’s own white when

My friend writes me from

across

the ocean

that we had never

noticed had gotten so big

while we were away

painting

our own

mountains purple and

amber like toaster waffles.

I love you like the

black crayon.

You are

not one line in the

pink address book by my bed.

You are the braids that

I cut.

We are

the color you want

a name for but just name it

silver because it

shimmers.

I love

him in the maroon

macaroons of my day dreams

I tend to have on

Tuesdays.

Follow me again to this precipice.

All my friends sit on boulders and wait.

I’ve always surmised what a forever is.

Maybe it’s God– perched on jaws of slate.

 

All my friends sit on boulders and wait.

We leave foot prints in crumbs of corn bread.

Maybe it’s God– perched on jaws of slate.

By next year’s tomorrow this skin will be dead.

 

We leave foot prints in crumbs of corn bread.

Hike with banana muffin wrappers as maps.

By next year’s tomorrow this skin will be dead.

We’re clementines in the sun’s pirouetted elapse.

 

 

 

I will build us a nest

each night

from other people’s book shelves

strained backpacks zippers

widowed socks

and zip lock bags with damp tooth brushes.

I’ll nestle in the space between

couch cushions and whenever

I encounter your voice

through a line in a song

on the radio.

I’ll make picture frames

from scotch tape.

 

I was a necklace of wind chimes.

I sing for the voice of the wind

lodged in your throat.

I was a trickle of mud and rain water.

I mumble for the gravel

secured in the currents of your spine.

I was a skeleton of a blue jay’s nest.

I crack my knuckles with the houses’s foundation

for the tremor of the tails of your

brown scarf behind you.

 

 

Dear Emmett,

I’ve never written names in love poems.

It has always felt too much like a promise.

Dear Emmett you are sesame seeds

on blue counter top.

You are mornings that steep

like lemon ginger tea.

I wanted to tell you about

how I will know you

on silty beaches and gravel bays

when it’s cold and rain

is painting the street

with a fine tipped bamboo brush.

Dear Emmett you are my necklace clasps

and the hand that clips them.

You are the blue lines

on blank notebook pages

and poems that I’ve yet to set

free like black parakeets

from my fingers.

Yes I know parakeets aren’t black.

Dear Emmett you are my promises.

Dear Emmett I’ll be your blue bird

Dear Emmett I’ll be sunny-side up eggs

 

page turns, page turns

and bus tickets to somewheres.

 

Imagine what it’s like

when the corn is high.

When the sun sets

a eight.

Day burns long–

trails off like incense

out the window of my

room in July when

breeze saunters through

the house and slams doors

like the ghost of my grandfather.

or the spirit of tornadoes

and lightning bolts

that somehow miss

our roof.

Imagine wind chimes.

Hear window chimes.

Imagine what the fields

are like with fox paths.

Follow them into the

home with slammed

hallway doors

and incense tentacles.

Tomorrow morning I will wake up

and take the first flight to Estonia

because it was the first country I could think

of that I think I don’t know anything about

Other than that it’s next to Latvia and Lithuania.

I don’t even know what language they speak there.

Maybe they speak German– and I would call

my brother and ask him to crudely translate

menus for me so I could order the same

garden salad  how I like it

with balsamic dressing demoted

to a cup on the side.

I wouldn’t try to read street signs.

I would pretend that I always knew

Estonia. That it was my homeland

that I was returning to after years of finding

myself lost in the life of a girl with blue

hair who loved old baseball movies

and falling in love by accident with everything.

I would first visit my father and tell him

that I was sorry I had missed so many birthdays

while I was lost as an American.

He would tell me that I wasn’t his daughter

and I would insist that I was.

I would cook dinner of instant noodles

with edamame beans if I would find them there.

I would get lost in America again but before I left

I would buy something from a corner

store that didn’t serve a purpose– like a ceramic

turtle dove or a snow globe that rained purple

confetti flower petals instead of snow.

I would buy a box of chocolates

to give to whoever I encountered from my

American life first. I would tell them that I had

seen them and thought of them.

I would buy a red delicious apple to eat on the plane.

I would pretend like I discovered something

in Estonia about myself other than

that I have a father I never bought a birthday card for.

He would remember me by my blue hair.

When I flew home I would pretend like I

was embarking on a journey

into a place that I had never been.

I would visit the farmer’s market up the

street from my house and act like a tourist–

I’d ask if everyone in Kutztown was Amish.

I’d sample the local delicacy of shoe fly pie

and wash it down with glass bottle root beer.

 

 

 

Christmas Cookies and How I Learned to Bake Myself into Holidays

I don’t know if my mother liked the

actual act of baking cookies or just

the idea of being surrounded by such a variety

that if our cluttered counter of church bulletins

Bed, Bath and Beyond advertisements  and

shards of notebook paper with phone numbers

scrawled on them were to

be permanently cleared away

that our muddled kitchen

could be the centerfold of the Martha Stewart Magazine

Holiday cookie edition.

I remember the days when I had been the egg

cracker or the one who put the raisin eyes

on the gingerbread men.

If I held a measuring cup it would only be

to pour what my mother told me.

I pretended to be a sous chef and

I wore a red and yellow apron with flowers to play the part.

We watched Chopped and Iron Chef

while the oven held bouquets of

pecan tassies, snicker doodles

thumb prints, and anise spritz flowers

tight to its chest like unopened love letters.

She doesn’t bake cookies anymore really

and it’s no body’s fault.

There was one year where she was in the hospital

the week before Christmas and the only present

I remember is an ultra-sound image of my

unborn brother– I remember asking if

it was a picture of me.

She had only gotten to bake the lemon pepper cookies.

I think that was the last year I ate cookies.

I learned how to use measuring cups.

I never stopped tasting cookies even

if I don’t eat them.

There is something about my anorexia

that has made me a wonderful baker–

better than the sous chef should be.

Instead of licking spoons I can

taste the way the butter and the sugar thicken

in the greedy arms of the mixer when

the batter brushes against my fingers.

I bite into the chalky surface of a chocolate meringue

with my eyelids as I watch them grown like

little crowns in the oven.

I know I should be trying to eat more cookies.

I know it’s weird that I hold oatmeal cranberry

dough in my palms like bird eggs

because I feel like I can almost

feel the oats between my teeth.

I know I didn’t eat enough cookies this Christmas

but when you told me about them

I felt like I knew what compelled the sugar

cookie dinosaurs to raise for the breath of the oven.

And soon I’ll be golden brown around the edges.

And soon I’ll brush the taste of

chocolate chip blondies from my teeth before bed.

Until then I’ll make my brother the sous chef

and I can be the baker.

And he can put the eyes on the gingerbread men.

And my mom can tell me they look beautiful.