Here I am,
sick again,
a small pile of cough drop wrappers
growing on my nightstand

It’s spreads,
they say,
from brain to body.
I can’t speak, can’t scream,
no one would hear me.

Stress wins today,
it got my best.
Tomorrow I’ll fight,
today I’ll rest.

I used to be a *******.
Now I’m just dumbfounded.

The afternoon sun makes the living room feel like a day at the beach.
River seeks the ripest beam and plants herself, closing her eyes.
The weekend suits her.

Your hair falls into your eyes and you push it away with your whole palm,
fixedly engineering the tallest tower in human existence.

I walk to the wall and pause the clock.
Everything freezes.

The threads of childhood are just beginning to weave around you,
funny how I hadn’t noticed.
Your hand is suspended in pursuit of a block,
your face intent,
your blue eyes shining with bright determination.

I tuck a stray curl behind your tiny ear.
What kind of person do you see when you look at me?
What kind of person do I want you to see?

The clock clicks back into rhythm with the universe, ticking and tocking once again in its forward march.

“Look Mama! A tower!”

Your hair falls into your eyes and you push it away with your whole palm.
River snores.

Such times as these,
we bottle our moments like wine,
hoping for feast,
preparing for famine.

What I’d like to impart to future generations
is that it’s completely okay
if your teeth
are a little
wonky.

Bleed your heart for paint.
Dip your pen into your veins,
Wring the refrain into the fine mesh colander,
boil your water
And feed it to your daughter.

Winter noisily clears his throat.

“Good Christ,” he says, “I just can’t shake this thing.”
He theatrically spits,
paTOOey, like Clint Eastwood,
into the Great Lakes region.

(Another record-breaker in Buffalo).

The Wind hisses, snaking through the dead leaves that carpet the frozen forest floor.
“Repulsive,” she mutters, and the waving grasses nod in agreement.

Winter is not in the mood. He freezes the grasses where they stand.

The Wind shimmies up the nearest tree and settles herself on a boney limb. It sways gently, as if underwater, and a few lean grackles startle and take to the air.
“What’s eating you?”

The sky will be the same color all day,
so it’s difficult to tell the exact time.
Could be nine or noon or 4:30.
People hate days like this,
but Winter relishes them, revels in them. Nothing comforts him more than an oppressively slate gray sky.

“I scheduled my favorite sky today but I can’t enjoy it. I think I’m getting sick.” He summons up another storm and accidentally drops it, this time on New Orleans.

“You’re getting sloppy, old man,” she says flatly. Winter is blustering and aggressive and gets on The Wind’s nerves when they have to spend this much time together.

She arches her back and sighs in irritation, disturbing the surrounding fauna. From the canopy above erupts a cacophonous flurry, jarred from their roosting place and screaming into the air: cedar waxwings and white-crowned sparrows, dark-eyed juncos, mourning doves and a lone red shouldered hawk, which arcs above the rest eying them hungrily. It selects a small sparrow and abruptly knifes down toward it, effortlessly slicing the sky in two.

Winter and The Wind watch quietly, interestedly. It’s one thing neither of them has control over. Fate.

Evolution and animal behavior can be influenced to a degree; landscapes and eco systems crafted; civilizations built and destroyed as quickly and easily as drying up a river. What’s written in the stars, the plot and grand finale of every living being, that’s a different department entirely.

Winter leans in,
“My money’s on the big one.”
The Wind rolls her eyes,
“How on-brand. I would have bet on the little one anyway.”

The two birds, predator and prey, swoop and dive gracefully through the dark daytime sky, a carefully choreographed dance imprinted on each of their DNA since the dawn of their creation. The little sparrow is fast but the hawk is just too big. It will clearly catch her.

“I think it’s because I’m overworked,” Winter looks at The Wind, continuing. “The snow quotas were raised just about everywhere except my usual route, you know? The Poles are really starting to freak out and it’s like, I’m telling them, sometimes you’ve gotta give a little to get a lot. I don’t want to promise them a new Ice Age just yet but all signs point to yes. It’s time for another big boy freeze, Wind, I can feel it in my bones.”

The Wind is still watching the birds. “We can only do so much planning right now while everything is so unpredictable. My schedule has me fanning California wildfires this season and it’s a real drag. I didn’t agree to this project, but you can’t just say that, right? So I’m there, I’m doing it professionally, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s a little outside my scope. Like, wildfires in the Palisades? I spoke to Fire and do you know it wasn’t even on her calendar? The extinction process is always so laborious and disorganized.”

The hawk is climbing altitude now, it won’t be long before it goes in for the ****. Exhausted, the sparrow flutters weakly, unable to give up.

Time briefly suspends, then a flash of feathers and talons and beak and it’s over. The little sparrow dies silently and maybe even gladly. She was so tired. Away, away, balanced upon the line of the horizon they both go, away to a nest or a cliffside to both fulfill their roles in the divine comedy.

“******* Nature.” The Wind has sat with Winter this way for aeons, since the birth of this place. She always bets on the small ones.

Winter smiles at her. “It’s been a long time since I had an Ice Age.” He clears his throat again and makes to rid himself of it, but The Wind cuts him off.

“You’re disgusting, I can’t sit here with you while you snow, it skeeves me out. I have a meeting with a weather system over the Baltic Sea that I can’t be late for anyway. Look, if you’re sick, you should rest. The next Ice Age can wait.”

She blows him a kiss and is gone, and the forest stills.

Winter is alone again. He begins the satisfying work of preparing for the evening’s offerings: black velvet darkness beneath a swath of gray expanse. An ice storm in the wee hours will see a glorious sunrise in a crystalline wood, the light dancing and refracting joyfully from blade to base to branch. He enjoys Wind’s company but doesn’t miss her. No one will lay eyes on tonight’s workings but the forest creatures and the celestials. This one is for them, and for the white-crowned sparrow. She deserves a holy funeral.

The hawk, back in its nest, gazes steadily at the slate gray sky. Night is coming. The hawk breathes in and out. In and out.

In.

And out.

We eat dinner together,
discussing the houseplants.
Is tonight a good night to give the dog a bath?
No, we decide. It’s a little too late.
Almost bedtime.

I change you into your pajamas,
and you resist.
You’ve been rebellious tonight,
trying out your independence,
walking around in it.

Daddy does bedtime:
it’s an easy one, you go right down,
and the whole world gleefully burns.

401 miles away
The oft handled Ceremonial Old Testament has already been presented, the rituals completed, and the ancient book returned to its resting place where it will wait to again be summoned.

The plans are laid and known by those present,
But let’s not talk about work, shall we?
The imagination fails to conjure limitlessness
As anything other than a yawning mouth
A ravenous, bottomless black hole.
The breadth of all Earthly treasure under the kingdom of heaven is laid before the expanding emptiness and
consumed
Consumed
Consumed.

The guests will remember this night for the rest of their short, comfortable lives.
The bounty of life, so plump and sweet, available to them each in perpetuity;
Yet how dreary, wouldn’t one say, to possess only one’s own life, own liberty, and so forth.
Thrilling to **** but so messy!
But then ah, to control the very right to existence while the people still live;
to hold their beating heart in one’s sweaty palm?
Exquisite.

I receive a text from Devin.
I ask them if they need anything from me.
We touch on the usual things and I miss them terribly,
Brokenhearted and blind with rage.

You are powerful, I say to them.
You exist.

And the band plays on as the demons feast on souls in Hell and the mausoleums lay cold and gray and still.

I saw him see me.

“Hello, ma’am? Miss? Hi, can I give you a free sample?”

**** ****

“Uh.”
Cue winning smile.

I had reflexively glanced at the store name, Bee & Co.
Bee is my daughter.
All Bees are my Bee.

“A sample. Sure, thanks.”

“Can I show you another sample? Just in here. I know you’ll love it, I promise you.”

No.

“Sure!”

****! Betrayal. I follow him in.

The space is unnecessarily large and aesthetically devoid of personality. White walls, glass shelves, side lighting. Small clusters of bottles and jars arranged on a table here, a shelf there. It’s giving Everything Must Go; it’s giving White Woman Influencer; It’s giving American ******.

“I’m so excited for you, you’re going to just die.”

I am trapped, and we’re off to the races.

“Have a seat.”

He’s good looking, sort of wolfish, this salesman. Early-to-mid 30s. Well-groomed, brown skin, black hair, gay. Pale and underslept in that giddy way that comes with overcorrection. Coffee? Adderall? *******? It’s that look, that hungry look. His accent is warming spices and hard liquor, and boy is he talking.

Words like

collagen
-medical-
<penetrating>

as he enthusiastically smears a glob of something under my eye,
“This one because it has the darker circle.”

His dark circles pool under his eyes and he intently explains the same thing over and over again.

Anti-aging,
lifting and tightening,
fine line reducing.

It’s a needy pitch,
Too thirsty.

Well what if I like my fine lines, I don’t say.
Crafted,
as riverbeds are,
as canyons;
Emblazoned, each. Earned.
Emblematic of my many lives.

(A door opens at the back; another man steps out. We make eye contact.)

The serum dries like Elmer’s glue on my delicate under eye skin.
It settles in strange places,
Pulls and distorts.
Discolors and cracks.

“I look older,” tapping it with my fingers.

“STOP TOUCHING IT!”

I stop touching it.

The mall is so close. Nothing is stopping me from leaving.

                                           (I don’t even want it).

We can’t afford it.
There. I said it.
                                                        (I don’t leave)
-aghast-
“You can’t afford it?!”
Pearls clutched.
“You, what? Are you serious?”
                                              (Why can’t I leave?)
Uh. Well. I have a family.

Brick.
I wanna smack him as hard as I can
Step.
I wanna be young and beautiful again
Brick.
I wanna burn this ****** to the ground.
Step.
I wanna apologize for being broke, for having bills, for ******* around.
Brick.
I don’t like this. I can get up and leave.
Step.
I absolutely have to make him like me.

But he’s irritated,
“We might as well even you out,”
As he slaps the goop under my other eye,
Still talking,
Talking a lot, a whole lot actually.
Too much.

Okay this is reaching a fever pitch and I was not prepared for the hard sell today.
His voice edges with desperation,
Shame on you for getting in your own way.

(I’m holding onto the tow line
The boat is unmanned
Reality has become unmoored
We are, none of us, truly in control)

“It will last forever, it will give you what you’re missing, it will patch up all your empty holes with collagen and kisses.
You can’t put a price on confidence
But I can tell you honest
I’ll price it half of where it’s at
To help you with the cost.”

I gotta get out of here.

“Uh.” Winning smile.

He gives me his card
                                                     (I don’t want it)
- His name “BEN” and an email address printed on receipt paper -

And with him is a torn box.
Something and something about something.

(What is reality anyway but a deeply subjective personal construct, tenuous at best, unknown and unknowable but for the rare fleeting glimpse between the gaps in the seams of the fabric of the universe?)

75% off. Because of the box.

The mirror is still on the table.

“Look look, it works, you look great”

                                                     (I don’t want it)

****.

****.

The mirror lies to me in a thousand languages as the glue shifts beneath my skin.

If you listen closely, I say, you can hear me shatter into a million pieces.

clink. clink. clink.

Ben and I skip hand in hand through the middle of the empty room to the checkout counter,
pirouette, arabesque, plie,
celebrating the space.
celebrating my face.

I am exhausted.

Ben’s hands are shaking at the counter. The WiFi isn’t working on the credit card machine. His hands. Are shaking.

“Uh.” Winning smile. “I’m really excited to start using this. Thanks for your help.”

He visibly relaxes. Has he breathed even once since I’ve been here? More employees arrive, they smile toward us. All men. All men.

I can tell Ben likes me now. He’s pleased, thank god. My whole being recoils at the thought of disappointing him, and I uncoil intentionally.

(Don’t think too hard about it.
You can’t put a price on confidence.)

I hope we never see each other again.

“How old are you?” He actually asks me.
A lady never tells.
“I’m 40.”
I’m 39 but getting the feel for it.
Forty. 40. I’m forty. I’m four hundred and forty.

I am ageless as time and vast as consciousness.

He feigns surprise.
I tell him he looks young.
He calls me cute and gives me a hug.
I turn to dust and blow away.

“Can I show you something? I think you’ll appreciate it.”

You don’t know me.

Winning smile.

“What’s that?”

He takes off his sweatshirt - “don’t worry” - and rolls up his sleeve.

A tattoo. Just above the crook of his elbow. He beams triumphantly.

                   TRUST THE PROCESS

I found out about the cancer at Bee’s first birthday party.

It was an accident, and who can blame him?
My father was visibly beside himself
So I asked.
He answered.

That’s how I found out,
But you know how it is.
I already kind of knew.

This year,
This year,
Was a year of gains and losses, alright.
More than any other year, I think.
Gains and losses.

How do you measure, measure a year?
My mother is alive.

Happy New Year.

Well, I like me,
I say aloud to my reflection,
Wiping a tear from my cheek.

I’ve been in here awhile.
Time to get back to work.

****.

I ruined my coffee.

Distracted and

Dumping

Creamer after creamer

To achieve desired lightness.

Turns out,

Trying to mask the bitterness

Made everything worse.

Do I drink it ruined?

Or not at all?

****.

Burnt and bitter is better than

Clotting creaminess coating my throat.

My final coffee of the year,

Of course it’s a teachable moment.

Something something authenticity.

I wish I had more coffee.

Who has time for this anymore?
My heart is pounding at your door
You seem to think you have forever more
As my heart pounds, frantic, at your door.

It’s not a promise, a tallied score,
It’s not an exposed rotten core
I wonder, is this what we’re dying for?
As my heart pounds, frantic, at your door.

You mop my body from your floor
My pleas unheard, my cries a chore
I wash up on your pristine shore
As my heart pounds, frantic, at your door:

You broke my heart today.
I worked your words around my mouth
And spit them out,
Each one a traitor to my tongue.

It’s funny how a dark red wine mood
Can shatter one’s bones.
Maybe this would hurt
If the neuropathy hadn’t set in
So heavy.
You know the numbness so well
It’s as if you feel it yourself.

I’m glad you’re free of grief
But the pain
The pain
You breathe it like fire
All of us alight in the heat of its flame.

I caught you in a dead faint
And set you on your feet again.
You’re not who you used to be
But still, you’re my sister.
That has to count for something.

Now we choose
The fights to fight
The end is nigh,
A coming night.

Now we break
Our jagged vow
Unspoken word,
An unwiped brow.

Now we cast
Our eyes aground
We break our hearts
To prove the sound.

Now we scream
Or hold our breath
We live our lives
Or die our death.

I’m eating this cake
Your homemade fruitcake
And it’s something, alright.
Bitter and sour,
Like rye bread with cherries.

The holidays are never easy
And this year is a testament to
The sour
Bitterness
That’s grown between us
Dark with sweet icing
And made with love beneath the dense
Thick
Dry
Cake
That makes up your smile
And mine, too.

A homemade fruitcake
Ripe for the picking.

I lick my fingers.

Delicious.

This is how it happens
Obsession then compulsion
Humming humming, jet propulsion
Palms to temples, heat emulsion

Pulling at the thread pulling at the
Thread pulling at the
Thread pulling
At the
thread
Thread pulling at until there’s

nothing in my head
Nothing in my
Head nothing in my
Empty underfed
Head
Nothing in my head

I’m just pulling at the thread

Pulling pulling

Pulling at the

At the thread
Pulling pulling at

Until
It
Stops.

Thank you for your steady breaths
And thank you for your weight
Thank you for your patience -
I do come in so late.

An overgrown aloe plant
Threatens to topple headlong
From her too-small resting place.
Reaching, as she does,
Reaching her tendril-like fingers
To the sun,
She bends and leans against the dining room window.

For herself, the sun is a casual riser this morning.
Rusty peaches and plums streak the sky,
A line here and there standing out among the hazy morning.
Cloudy today, supposedly, but clear and bright in these early hours.

It looks cold out there,
even the sunrise tints her paintbrush with frost,
And the naked trees slash dramatically black against the increasingly pastel background.
No wind. The leaves are still.

I take this moment and secretly fold it behind my ear
To visit among the noise of the day
To breathe in like a cigarette,
out like a sigh.

You feel unheard,
This much is clear,
Screaming into the child’s ear.
It’s something you’ll later deny
When you learn you scared her
And made her cry.

You cried, too.
Boo hoo hoo hoo.
It isn’t Christmas
Without a meltdown or two.
And always from you,
Always keeping the score
It’s funny how everyone else has more.

Yes, we can hear you,
So loud it’s obscene.
Pour some wine, smoke some ****.
It will make you less mean.

Uh oh

Here we go

Everyone look out below

Is it sickness?

I suppose.

Baby fever’s

Got my nose.

It’s dry and still in the house this afternoon,
The way houses are at 4:00 in December.
I feel a little itchy and claustrophobic,
Sitting on the floor.
I hate this ******* carpet.
Berber.

I know you love me,
But sometimes I wish you would let me destroy myself completely.

Darkening winter gray settles over us in a dull film,
Berber carpeting the world.
It seeps into the house through cracks in the doorframe you kicked down when we were locked out that night.
Into me too, coating my brain and joints and dreams in liquid fog.
The streetlights will be dark awhile yet.

Cotton ***** fill up my mouth
And I’m fine, just fine.
My grandmother’s favorite color was gray before people awarded points for such things.

It’s nearly night, now, and the sky swirls with peek a boo pink and blue where the clouds are thin and blowing.
No streetlights yet.
The shadows gather at their feet.
I pull out the spaghetti;
Time to start dinner.

I saw something today on Instagram
One of my many astrology pages
Informing me that this is the time
To let go of pessimism
And external validation.

First of all,
I’m not pessimistic.
I’m a ******* delight.

Secondly.
How would I ever get anything done
Without the promise of a
High five at the end?

Silly moon,
You know not your small pale daughter.
Leave me in peace
And I will leave you to your royal fullness.

I think the secret to a long life
Is to be in love with every thing.
It’s easy, honestly, to love greatly and truly.
It’s the easiest thing.
You should try it,
Just try it.
Breathe and the air is sweeter
Open your eyes
There is so much to pine for.
Being in love is noble work
And we need you, the lovers.
We need you more than ever.

Tonight
Again
I battle myself
As Vince Guaraldi twinkles low on the smart speaker
And the baby sleeps
And the tree in the corner absorbs water into its severed spine
And the lights shine merrily
And the dog kicks and snores
And the dishwasher sloshes
And the wind chimes sing
And the clock ticks
And the wine bottle drains
And drains
And drains
And tomorrow looms,
Always so distant,
Always so near.

I’ve mined for gold
But I’m getting old,
Too many holes.
Searching for souls
Has taken its toll
An empty bowl
For a mink stole.

I wasn’t there for The Final Fight.

Frankly,
it sounded like the same old *******,
Old words, new spit
Old hurts that won’t quit.

I wasn’t there.

But I’ve attended that fight,
And it’s too shiny to die,
Glittering with layers of lies
Roughly the shape and size of a perfect slingshot stone
And worn hot and smooth from years of carving into bone.

It isn’t fair, the choir sings,
As one triumphant final chord rings clear and long,
So ends the song.
The war lost
The battle won.
It’s not as fun to take the bow when the audience is gone.

You know,
Trauma is tricky.
It evolves quickly,
a parasite
That grows when you feed it
And knows that you need it.

You shaped yourself around that shard of pain
And it lanced through your childhood and ate the remains
There’s no knowing where you end and it begins.
You are the same.

Its’s strange to mourn someone who isn’t dead
Your aliveness rattles around in my head.
I picture you alone in your garden,
Which thrives the way only a loved thing can.
It repays you in lilies, tomatoes, sunflowers,
a hundred different birds in springtime
Who return again each season
Hoping you will feed them.

I come to you again.
Always do.
And sure as eggs,
You’re always here,
Right where I left you.

I bring you the mundanities that weave me together;
I hope they’re beautiful in their ordinariness.

Pointillist.

You know that painting,
The one of the people in the park?
Like that, my mundanities.
Like if I step back one day,
My moments will be arranged into a perfect pattern of great and universal significance.

Having a daughter.
Tasting an orange.
Holding.
Being held.

Writing a little heart song when I should be asleep
The words of my whims dotting the landscape
While the dog smiles and snores at the foot of the bed.

Oh, look, I’ll say.

I see it now.

I am 4.
14.
24.
38.

I am 38 and you’re making me scrambled eggs.

You got the call and you’re making me scrambled eggs.

It’s the night before the morning of your transplant.

Old women sing of their mothers.
And I know I will always miss you when you’re gone.

But not today.
Not today.

I’m sorry, I say.
And you say, no. I’m your mama.

I’ll always be here to make you scrambled eggs.

I am 38.
24.
14.
4.

And we’re at the kitchen table. You’re so tired and I’m so little and it’s so late.

I’m sorry, I say.

And you say, no. I’m your mama.

I’ll always be here to make you scrambled eggs.

I remember the first time I got high.

My boyfriend’s mom
Had bough croissants
The day before.

It’s Thanksgiving Eve
And these croissants
Are delicious.

There’s something so comforting
In trading in everything
The taking and giving
Of motherhood

What does it mean to be whole?
Shifting your insides around an additional soul?
The pain and the toll
Of motherhood

How to express
The vastness of universes
Alongside the mundane  
Of getting dressed in the morning?

There’s something so absolute
Something so boundlessly true
In the brown of the root and the red of the fruit
In the green of the shoots
Of motherhood

Exhaustion is a thousand starving mouths;
Insomnia, a single gnawing doubt.

There’s a monster lurking
Jerking
Working at the chains fixed to the wall

It’s gnawing,
ever sawing
Ever sawing through the gristled gall

And here I am
A traitor
Telling tales
Upon the bristled ball

Oh treason, tongue of daggers, poison apple take the fall!

I stare into the maw.

- - -

I wander through the mists of mourning
Pearls adorning every limb
As tears.

They drop and drip,
they pour in
waves, cascades
they coat my lips as fears

And warnings, death and din
And here I am, a berth of sin
A deer,

the headlights imminent,
the rain downpouring,
glistening and raw;

I stare into the maw.

It is rare that I see me in you.

Oh my word, they all say,
She looks just like her daddy!

They’re right, of course.
The snub of your nose, the sleepy turn of your eyes,
The golden autumnal hue of your shining hair.

No, I rarely catch my reflection in your mirror.

This morning, though,
you didn’t know I was looking.
You were staring out the window, music playing in the background,
At some blissful something in the cloudy October sky
And I flashed to the moon chasing the car when I was six years old.
Nine.
Thirteen.
Listening to Paul Simon and Linda Ronstadt with dreamy ears in the dark backseat of my parents’ old GM conversion van:

“Joseph’s face was Black as night, and the pale yellow moon shone in his eyes.”

And suddenly I’m blinking back tears on the way to the babysitter on a pearlescent early-fall day,
Fearing as sharply as hoping,

Please god let her have inherited the moon.

I should be asleep
Or playing the guitar.

I should be planning my next moves
Like the spider who lives in the screen door
Always weaving, weaving,
Catching her flies.


I should be asleep
Or playing the guitar
Or planning, weaving,
Catching flies.

Whoever heard of a person who just sits?

Yet here I sit.

Just.

Sitting.

I’ve been unsupported lately.
Not a leg to stand on.
Some would call it untethered.

Floating.

A kinder soul might liken it to flying,
But they would be wrong.

Flying starts and ends with both feet on the ground.

It is calm
It is sour on the tongue
And then sweet
A green apple
Rainwater
Just a capful.
Petrichor
In my living room
Behind the eyes
In my living room.

I am calm.
I am sour on the tongue
And then sweet.
A secret. In my living room.
Just a capful of rainwater
On the tongue.

It is calm.
A green apple.

It is calm.
Just a capful.

I place the pacifier not -in- your hand
But near it.

You surely will find it there
Right there
In the dark
When you are searching for comfort.

I nudge it a little closer,
Thinking of little girls whose parents don’t protect them
And wishing I could climb over these rails
Into this little crib
And hold you hold you hold you.

I bid the pacifier take over,
Sleep tugging me away from you with its persistent hand.
A curse, really, to abandon my post.

How many hours do we lose to sleep?
I would give them all up
To stretch this time out and out and out.
You, dreaming your mysterious dreams
And me, right there when you awaken.

Reclaiming my time
From tequila to lime
Breathing the air, and
Pretending it’s mine