It was late November in Los Angeles,
back when it still used to rain.
In that old apartment in which everything felt
filtered yellow, like coffee stained teeth.
The walls, like you, were too thin;
at times I could hear your neighbor crying.

We used to drink, and head up to the rooftop,
where we would smoke too many cigarettes
and loudly declare our love.
Our aesthetic was broke and romantic.
Drunkenly admiring one another like
we admired the city
by romanticizing it's flawed demeanor.

"...don't you remember me babe,
I remember you quite well..."
I sang to you while I ran my cold fingers
through your soft waves.
You hated Dylan but joked
that I nailed it, and
began warm my hands with your breath.

Let me once more wake in my
Grandparent's dusty home.
Baths in the sink, belly out,
cereal on the table.
Petting the big brown dog;
putting my fingers in his mouth
to feel the warmth of his tongue.
******* on lemons;
picking out their seeds
with my small hands.
No thoughts of loss,
no thoughts of war.

Through some shiny contraption,
the pasta emerges smooth and flat.
Your arm around your new lover;
flour spread over a counter,
the both of you grinning.
When you look at the picture you can't tell
if you're this version, or the other.
You are a puzzle pieced together by a child
who knows nothing about life.

In a dream you're at the creek
where we saw the bear last summer;
this time he speaks to us and sounds like my grandfather.
Laughter like shaking gravel, morphs into babbling water
careening over boulders.
There's a hole in the creek,
in the sky,
in you,
the breeze makes it sting, like salt on a wound.
You clench your teeth and look into the void.
It is the color of everything you loved and lost.
You want your hands to transform to wings,
but again, you are a child who knows nothing about life.

Last winter, wildflowers grew in the California desert,
they called it a Superbloom, it happens every decade.
Soft petals withered into their own bones before the next moon.
Time erodes canyons from mountains, through the earth,
through flesh, through veins, it's all the same.
Natural disaster doesn't always sound a siren,
sometimes things, silently get worn away.

Elliott reads aloud from some adventure book, I take over when his eyes are tired.
Luna is in the bath again, she’s a mermaid this week.
Jeremy works from home, his eyes dart back and forth, across computer screens.
If you weren’t watching the news, one could mistaken this merely as reverence for the mundane.
I turn off the news, and feel guilty for wanting to look away, I turn it back on again.
I did nothing to deserve the safety of my home, with the people I love.
I am reminded of the day the second Iraq war started,
we watched from our couch.
Black and white images of falling bombs flooding our screens,
our youngest brother weeping in my mother’s chest.
We all held him and assured him that it was happening somewhere far away,
that it was happening in someone else’s house, not our own.
I wanted to cry then, but I thought I was too old,
Sometimes I want to cry now, but I’m even older.
The neighbor’s dog howls all day long.
The kids run, laughing maniacally, from living-room,
to bedroom, and back again.
They are unencumbered by the chaos that remains unseen/unfelt in our home
I am grateful for that.

You’ll be 34 this year, you remember as you take a sip of wine,
the same wine you drank before it was legal to do so.

You struggle to decipher which parts are yours still,
and which parts belong to the girl who indulged
Before her time.

You tried to paint the moon tonight, on the good paper,
it doesn’t turn out. You attempt to capture it on your phone.
Despite how clear it was, it just escapes you.

There is dust collecting in the corners of your dining room floor.
You tell yourself that real women have clean baseboards.

They don’t attempt, and fail, to paint the moon when their children fall asleep.

You admit that you have not met the standards of your mother.
She never looks at you with disappointment,
she’s just scared the others would never understand your heart the way she does.

The record on the player needs to be flipped over,
That’s a compromise you’ve made,
for being able to indulge in the past a little longer,
once again.

It’s 2 am, a bookmark for sleep, that’s when adults
are allowed to go home.

You clean your brushes under cold water,
make sure to turn off all the lights.