Burn
I’ve never before feared the heat; today it whispers, I could kill you.
The hottest day of the year
But here I lay under a tree with a thousand limbs
On top of a thousand roots
The leaves gently dance in the wind
The water is still and the shade is light
The birds soothe me with their songs
A place I could never be tired of
I find peace in the natural sounds,
In the vibrant colors,
And the details of the bark she carefully carved
I tend to forget that she carved me, Picked out every color,
From my green eyes, to my brown hair, to my soft pink lips
Perfectly placed each freckle and stretch mark like limbs and leaves
I am so similar to the art I love,
Yet I don’t treat myself like the trees
I strive to adore myself as much as I adore the leaves,
And the grass, the birds, the bark, the water, and Mother Nature herself
Because I, too, am her art
My parents anchored
our childhood,
forming crosspiece and hook
Dad died when I was 16
and the anchor wobbled,
(mom always was the hook)
Slowly, my four siblings
and I clasped hands,
a replacement crosspiece
When mom’s mind began to fray
we criss-crossed our arms,
to form a steady X
Mom died
and our sibling anchor
held us, steadied us
Four months later,
that flash flood
carried Helen away
For a year I
subsisted,
adrift and disinterested
Gingerly,
I returned to
my spouse, daughters, siblings, nieces, nephews, friends.
And the slow realization
that I was anchored anew.
Crying on my mother’s shoulder
At night in the summer in a heatwave
Choking on air and Polaroid film
Is the closest thing I’ve got to living
I repeat her name, a mantra, don’t forget
Don’t trust what I think once the sun falls
It’ll kill me like it kills her if I listen to advice
From headless bedroom objects, the dead flys
And the ghost of my child-self screaming
For someone to hold her head gently above
The blue late June haze and the lack of
Diagnosis and understanding. The restlessness
The dreams and suicide pacts, pinky promises
With the hand-me-down dolls on the dresser
Sunbleached and faces wiped out of existence
Hand-me-down a pill bottle and a body
I wasn’t living then, barely at all, too young
To articulate my sense of self and now I
Am just a picture of my mother distorted
Through a couple decades aside and
A camera that prints the people all wrong
This is something bombastic,
already i must scramble
to remember the sound of your voice,
its faint echo a warbled, static-busted
radio, & me pulling at the antenna,
bent against one star
and the next. my fingers slow-turning
the grooves of the dial,
hoping to find your right
frequency. if i leaned backside
out of a window, your laugh would become
a bird floating belly up,
and the sky a ground
neither of us can grasp.
