In red spray paint. Or fading Sharpie.
Or water swaying at a finger’s brush:
DJ Sad GRRRL
has fled.
Do Not Follow.
On a bridge railing by the great Pacific Ocean:
I was here.
Scribbled above a horse drawn in wax crayon
and illuminated at mid-day.
Or later, under the light of the moon.
Or in the comfort of a flickering candle.
Or tinted by the artificial glare of a smartphone screen.
I hope she’s into dead guys.
Printed in condensation on the side of a glass.
Cool to the touch. Dripping.
It’s a hazy image. The figure, a man or woman,
young or old, one color or another.
Holding the pen
in 17,000 BC or tonight.
They quickly form familiar symbols
left to be reborn by morning.
Don’t forget me
who is so easily condemned.
Language, grant me shelter in your immortal cave,
so I might live in you
and you might breathe for us both.
Your yellow communion dress is fading—fabric folded in a desk drawer.
In my dearest dream it is sewn together beneath the arms,
at the tapered ends(to account for growth).
I relive many evenings on my porch in December’s dreary daylight.
The family gathered in a rental through Arizona’s divergent winter
(one that is both dry and sheltered in snow).
I am wearing our cousin's graduation gown and your head
leans against the cupboard door bearing laughter.
In another life this is the start of piecing a family back together—
we do not mourn in the months to come. You start a job as a hairstylist
in Arizona
because it’s easier to imagine you breathing elsewhere.
Your door is still ajar. Warmth rises from the radiator.
I imagine you are many miles from this child’s bed,
the sick dog curled at your feet, where you died.
I am driving home, stuck between semi-trucks;
you are steering through the briars in our home fields.
(The dream that wears hardest on my heart)
Burnt sienna is the medium I pack with water and drape
in layers upon the sanded wood. In the winter, when my nights are free for painting.
It was once an old horse named Jack,
his head the size of my body,
when I slept in a pool of green,
and he grazed it.
Mud I mould which so many have trodden through—
boot prints into terracotta clay
left by daughters chasing blue-black birds in the foothills,
and years later, daisies.
More a ghost than a base for paint, taking plural translucent forms:
the shape of dry whiskey coughed and choked, glass cracking in the tight grip
of a man we will never see again
as he leans back in the wooden chair—its grain a burnt sienna.
Or it is freshly watered soil in spring, the womb birthing Earth’s progeny.
I am painting a picture for my mother that she will never see
in shades of burnt sienna.
For the freckles we share,
our orange-ish hair tied back and cut.
In its fifth year on a shelf somewhere north.
Her eyes wrinkle as she brushes it with washed hands.
And I brush the canvas again.
Lately, I’ve been yearning to obtain
the graceful sorrow of La Pietà in my painting.
The marble shone like a tear.
I have been believing in other myths...
If you look up through the windchimes' wooden tunnels,
you will hear the ocean
and the little boy who steals buckets from it.
And dashes away. And hides.
When I am in the open air,
waves come down upon the shore and mold
into the hands of prayer. The nails,
the pale wrinkles of the tide,
dig into wet sand and beg for penance.
My paint has dried before I can lay it. The ocean
chases the boy. My brush frayed, strokes messy,
and the painting is muddled into a single shape
that melts from the canvas like an old candle
long abandoned in the good night.
My feet tied with ice to the wooden floors
like Emily Dickinson. An investment estate
in Amherst, Massachusetts—clean and Protestant.
Like her hands. Washed twice a day in the ice.
Because it was soon to be spring—
everything melting or being baptized.
And I trimmed the grass to impress the prophets
visiting in clouds of snow—
in the shapes of quivering doe—
moose who dragged their ponderous reflections—
chained down.
My blood clots and slows—pours
onto the tabletop and sears an imprint
(the shape of a cross, some
harbinger of deprivation)—
pools in my empty stomach.
What prophets could we be one day? Our two minds
soldiering on—well-made machines
with gears that dance as one, slow and practiced,
when the weather comes to be right.
At least I am not the robin who hung by his throat—
tangled in the branch that was also long dead,
how he swayed in the April wind.
Before the water was too polluted to make clean,
the scent of chlorine burned in your nose,
your eyes—unprotected.
Between the rose bushes, you prayed,
watching the leaves cast shadows across the ground
until the coves of green resembled utopian cities.
This is how I imagine you grew up–
in close conversation with the sun on summer days,
with the weeds and old sculptures in the garden.
This is how I imagine a life said to have once been mine.
And it is impossible to believe…
Because no one looks as they did then;
the fruit trees are not so vibrant.
The wind has forgotten its sibilant song.
What child could I have been?
For by the time I returned home at dusk,
the youthful good had all but escaped my palms,
and it was a cold winter,
and the rain seeped through me.
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