1970’s white shag carpet in piano room, teardrop chandelier in dining ironic because we are not chandelier people, although my Mucka could make that piano sing. Brady Bunch den, only one story, stone, exposed brick, lots of windows and one long, dark hallway. Born 1976, Halloween night, I discovered her beautiful carpet held a multitude of sins, dust mites, and pet dander– Mucka covered it with wall-to-wall plastic to protect “me.”

Shag’s scent– wool and dust, thick plastic– a faintly new “car” smell– created a crackly path to that ominous hallway with a powder blue bathroom at the end, all other doors remained closed as per Mucka’s instructions. However, as children are wont to do, I sometimes opened my absent Aunt Jojo’s door to let the sunshine sneak out creating a hurdle to jump. Taking off at the kitchen I blazed down the hallway and– as gracefully as a four-year-old could– leaped over the daylight on legs extended in full grand jete! My Mucka hollering from the den that I was going to shatter the Hummels because my vaults were shaking the chandelier and she knew what I was up to. I could hear her waggling finger from two rooms away, but that didn’t mean compliance. Which is why I got to sit stuck to the plastic on that lovely sofa in the piano room admiring the sunlight streaming through the picture window and wondering where shag carpet came from.

As I settled into more subdued adulthood, that rebellious joy subsided into concern. The plastic long since gone (the Hummels too–zero survived my younger sisters and cousins with their own olympics) The gloom of the corridor no less daunting but for different reasons. The air went from Hawaiian Tropic and Aquanet to alcohol swabs, urine leaks, disillusionment.

Mucka’s ghost still lingers, rattling that chandelier and Papa– who’s 93. They could make each other laugh but their silent battles had casualities and that somber passage delved deeper into the shadows than I could envision as a child.

Now, I want all the doors open!

Rejuvenating
rehydrating
regenerating
revitalizing
rebalancing
replenishing
renewing

working its magic
on the epidermis.

Underneath,

the veins continue
their blue accounting.

Loquacious little red bird
Heard preaching top my tree
While you cannot proclaim a word
Your warning’s clear to me

“Don’t let pests ruin your pesto! These are the most common culprits
 behind holes in basil leaves.” –https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/ 

I watered the basil today for absent Brother Gardener who left instructions. 

One leaf had a hole: Prompting curiosity.
A gardening website (somewhere I’d never visit,
being a poet ignorant of nature)
warns me
of “snails and slugs,
Japanese beetles,
earwigs, aphids
and other soft-bodied insects.”  

Even this ignorant bard could sing
of snails and slugs, earwigs and aphids,
celebrating the soft-bodied
(for I am certainly their kin).  

I am cautioned about such slow-moving mollusks,
told “to cover the mulch with diatomaceous earth,”
which (apparently) deadly to slugs and snails,
pierces and dehydrates them.
“Crushed eggshells or wood ashes will have a similar effect,”
as these slow-moving invaders
hide in garden detritus,
and make it a nursery. Oh my.  

Do I love the basil’s scent on my fingers,
a memory from the past, of my Nonna’s garden,
enough to plot medieval warfare
on the creche of these invaders–
spears to pierce, dehydrate, commit infanticide
on a microscopic scale?
Frankly, no.
Brother Gardener
has planted in abundance on the friars’ terrace
and we will share with the soft-
bodied and the slow-
moving
as is only fitting.
for sons of Saint Francis,

She thought she was done with all that
but something passes between them
a warm current of it
the thought is sticky
she touches it with her tongue
lets it wash over her  

She steps back into the story
a liquidity moving, all muscle and bristle
waiting to be touched
imaginings low and sweet
  
She is surprised to find
the universe is one rhymed thing
the grass is, the sky is, water is
the song that lifts between two bodies  

She wanted to write everything down
words rooted at the bottom of the lake
but first, before words, a feeling must root
so human and achy it’s worth celebrating  

She runs the reels of him in her head
this wet commingling
still feels the kiss
shivers with its half-life
silver and dizzy as a disco ball
and the room kaleidoscoped into
blankets of stars  

To touch the tender core of things
and tell of it, she will press it here
to the page, a dried flower,
something your body said to mine  

Right now all she wants
is the two of them testing each other—
a settling into themselves
a story about human kindness
a breaking open, a breaking out
the future deepening in the heat
what a pleasure to say,
From here, we can make it up.           

~ A cento, using lines/phrases from the following books:
       All the Fierce Tethers, essays by Lia Purpura
       Blade by Blade, poetry collection by Danusha Laméris
       Entwined, Three Lyric Sequences by Carol Frost
       Hereafter, fiction by Sarah Freligh
       The Hurting Kind, poetry collection by Ada Limón
       Tides, a novel by Sara Freeman  

I’m not jealous of her,

I’m jealous that she was able to experience you before I did.

I’m not jealous of her,

I’m jealous that you thought she was the most beautiful thing in the world once.

I’m not jealous of her,

I’m jealous she got to hold your hand, hear your heartbeat, inhale your scent, breathe your air, all before I did.

I’m jealous that your souls intertwined before ours. I’m jealous that your future with her was planned before ours.

I’m not jealous of her.

          tenor sings at dusk
top of weathervane glints red
               cardinal solo

eight years my face stolen
by knife and gouge the roman hand
   of nails gladius
i tongueless tasteless sightless shuttle food from one formless space to another
for ears my only sustenance:
   a mother and a daughter
   and their godly hope
   of a boy who bears his bondage more
   beautifully than i
so what i struggle an ugly penalty to the ground below Jerusalem
and no tender sunrays
glisten to brighten my labor
ever
over the countless nameless numberless days
so what i say unsaid
   just teeth and throat less eloquent than the man
   who writes my soul

now if the narrative looses me onto the hot loud world
let God throw me back to the hunch in this cell
let God make me half the shadow of that boy
let God put palm to leper’s cheek
and me like shrieking leopards speak
   in words beyond my mouth