I remember the slamming screen doors,
the rattle of the stained glass monster,
and the drafty shadowed nights beneath chenille bedspreads.
 
I remember the sun soaked cloak room with its reek of wet woolen mittens,
the un-impeded flight down stairs in tomato basket bobsleds,
and the bouncing at the bottom in a frenzy of strawberry carpet burns.

I remember church bingo basements smoky on Friday nights,
Saturday morning sounds from her kitchen,
and a mile of sulfur dusted sidewalk in between.
 
I remember the damp musty smell of the low lit basement,
the passing of Black Label beer through semi-circle windows,
and the nauseating hangover from Mogen David wine kept in the cellar.
 
I remember hearing how they kicked in the door while she slept and beat her
and took her things, her rings, the gifts from my grandfather,
and how she stubbornly refused to leave the home my mother was born in.

A half century book ended on one end by the great depression,
which she survived,
on the other end the kicked in door
which she did not.
 
I remember my mother’s wavering voice when she told me she was dead,
how Uncle Ed found her sitting in her chair, rosary beads wrapped
around arthritic hands.
 
I remember hot on the left and cold on the right,
the smell of her sweat,
the breeze off the lake,
the creak of the old steam radiator,
and the way she slept in her chair with her mouth wide-open.
 
The way Uncle Ed found her.

My fingers tangle and trip
over sloppy knitting
like a deer
learning to walk on crooked
pencil legs.
Like a song I don't quite
know the words to.
I move unsteadily,
uncertain, with short shaky breaths.
Remember when I taught my lungs
to breathe again in August?
After so many mistakes that
I didn't know how to
reconcile.
I wanted to die out back
of a hotel in Montana, dramatic
in the weeds and grasshoppers.
Needles fighting, I
spread a mess of mustard yarn
across my fingers like
I need a napkin.
Has anything changed?
Dropped stitches, weary knots leaving
gaping holes.
I think of how I ran away
from it all.
There are days I still look back.
But I look straight into the sky
as if demanding an explanation from
God himself.
I have to shade my eyes
sometimes,
seeing blinding brilliance
in the sun now.
I can't live any longer only
by the light it sheds
everywhere else.
No, in births of light and bursts
of truth and slow, overdue breaths
is a song I'm finally learning
the words to.
You will not defeat me.
I rip out my knots
and begin again.

I anticipate that on some distant roof
there must be a man waving two distinct flags,

so as to direct the flock of birds flying above me.  Crossing
his arms, the fabric folding and slipping against itself

in the wind, making a noise of snaps
and swooshes and billowing.

This thought suddenly makes my jacket
seem oversized; the sleeves feel lengthened,

drooping over my hands, as though
I were still a child at play,

putting on father's army jacket on Sunday morning
before church; him in a dress shirt

and black suspenders, shaving in front of the steamy
bathroom mirror.

And I notice that I can see my breath
as it escapes the sauna of my insides.

It disperses into the February air—
no man waving flags on a distant roof somewhere

to keep its molecules from scattering
in every direction.

There once was a girl who now no longer exists
In a city that no longer exist, with a name
That no one in existence can pronounce
And that only inexistence can imagine.
She lay in a bed that also no longer exists
Playing a game, that only existed in nonexistence,
With a boy whose existence is, again, no longer real.
The one rule of this game that has long been lost in existence
If it ever really existed at all, the one rule of this bed game was and is,
The bed is the only thing that exists at all.
The boy and the girl who both no longer exist they,
Drew a line around the bed, rendering it their only plane of existence
Neither a toe nor a finger could touch the floor as they were sure
That that was too close to earth to not nonexistence
And touching this floor, this divider between existing and not,
Was not the point in their coexistence in their nonexistence
You see this game was not for those who exist
Because they did not exist. Not in this house,
On this street, in this city, all of which are no longer in existence.
But they exist to one another in their bed of inexistence
But to no one that now exists at all.
Centuries of existence will be worth this kind of inexistence.