My birth was christened with a curse
but every year those parties were flurries
of bon fires and candle sparklers.
My feet didn't touch the dance floor
it seemed, not once, while
the orchestra was playing
a whirling dervish of a waltz
bangs cropped carefree
across the plains of my tanned face,
swishing and twirling the knee length
pink gown,
kicking off pinching white flats to steal
across the June-hot grounds
only to drift back to father’s feet
for another dance.

The orchestra packs up,
the courtly ladies yawn behind trailing sleeves
as I am tucked in
my bed of feathered down, only to wake up  
thirteen years later, with cricks
nestled in the tendons of my neck
and rickety cramps twitching like
the seizure flickering of lightning bugs
through my thighs, as dust billows and rises
with my shifting in the strange light.

Sleeping Beauty wakes up
eighty-seven years ahead of schedule
in the suburbs, the curse a dud
with no prince to sweep her into syrupy swoons
with no words to name this coiling, clammy heat,
this suffocating musk.

I drag my weight
through the two-story house, teaching myself
a new vocabulary
so I can learn to breathe
through the ugly fits of orange tinted panic
at the spider webbed frailty of magic
the kismet pinprick of a spinning wheel
and the helpless sighs of my parents,
a King and Queen dethroned, overthrown
from their untouchable, eternal pedestal.

I couldn't dance
at my next birthday celebration,
when the orchestra was playing
a rollicking rondeau,
mostly because
my hair was too slicked and curled,
framing my fickle new skin,
sitting and twisting a silk napkin in my lap,
ribs locked in the powder blue grip of a whale,
resting poised to turn my toes into graceful
creatures, ten crippled wood nymphs.
To run I would have stumbled,
and it was impossible not to notice that
while we stood, my eyes grazed the top
of father’s thinning, speckled head.
I would break his feet with one more dance.

We spend our first nine months in
small sacks of transparent, rosy
membranes and indigo-blue veins.

Floating in the fluid darkness,
we breath in time to the beat
of waves rising and breaking

rushing in and out of unseen chambers
of the heart. Existence is a pulsing communion
with God in the ebb and flow of silence

before we wash ashore on the dry banks
of the canal and learn to scream.
My nephew was born small and wrinkled

into latex gloves, with fluid in his lungs.
Brushing my pinky against his petal-fragile
skin, I think of the tides and

the people who return to them with
stones in their pockets, surrendering
to the crashing of salt and heaven

as the first mother fills them
in an inversion of that Egyptian
myth of creation—a small piece of the world

sinking back into Nu’s cold embrace
—and something old and fiercely bright
rises up, overflowing into my smile,

hot and sweet. My eyes burn red against
the late November air as the origins of love
wash me clean.

She will kiss in public while she’s young enough,
old enough, in love, or bored enough,
without any damns or ***** to give you.
Her hips move at a cant, leaning eager
like the legs of new-limbed lambs.

She waves them on
with twin fingered salutes,
all for a moment,
of ****** hands, tilted necks,
for heels popping off the floor
in rejection of restraint.

So watch.
Drop your jaws
and shove your sweat-lined hands
deep in your lint-filled pockets
while she pours her endorphin soaked joy
into that boy's mouth
surrounded on all sides by Technicolor
sweetness wrapped and bottled,
anticipating its own undoing.

They squirm inside their clothes
tweed, chiffon tiered skirts, and bows
of their grandmothers’ sepia, halcyon days

with lumberjack flannel and Kerouac quotes,
but it’s more a matter of age than size,
these charging, listless, candid creatures

with hairstyles that can only be described
as gravity readily defied and self-cut,
frequently dyed to shades that swing

between black coffee and New York poetry
deep imagism and social realism against the backdrop
of American Apparel ads on scratched up Macs.

They slouch up and down trafficked Newbury,
dropping names like Morrissey and Bukowski
pausing now and then to pick up on the ennui

of twenty-three, and how they will one day live la vie
Dharhimian, running on American Spirits,
James Dean, Truffaut chic,

a monthly check from their parents,
an apathetic sneer at holding anything too dearly
and how they hate that word—*hip-ster.

If you wake tomorrow with
bruises blooming purple-yellow
across your knees
lungs stinging fuchsia  
muscles coiled tight and red
only to find you’ve run out of tiger balm
and friendly shadows have grown long
in the distance of years and the unknown

read a poem

Sift through the smoking ashes
of countries lost, rooms emptied, songs forgotten
breathing verdant sparks into the rotten chambers
of your heart. Poetry is soul kissing,
holy sinners meeting palm to palm
under the wild banners of longing
waving, aching and strong.

I work poetry into my pains
through my fingers, onto the page.