I remember lying naked in each other’s arms;
smirking in jest that you’d best tread lightly—
one day, you may just get sick of my company.

Then, suddenly, one day came.

Now, I trace
those tread lines left behind
and yearn to be the traveler
instead of the traveled;

to be free of me too.

The skin bursts juicy and fragrant around the tender white fruit inside
filling my mouth and my head with a delicious knowledge and sense of ripening power
i can feel the beat beat beat of my white heart darkening to red then to black the beat beat beat that takes me from ignorance to enlightenment
the delight of the fruit and its incredible taste not comparing to the joy of the sin the rebellion filling my heart quickly turning from ignorance to utter bliss
Punishment we can never overcome, upon us and all my descendants, a secret pleasure of disobedience becoming rooted in our mouths, brains, hearts for all eternity
in this land of gods I have created a monster, the world of angels and unnamed animals a place of serpents, sagacious humanity, and beautifully intermingled immorality

Sin, shaping itself smoothly around the core i hold in my *******, has made me wise and in my own eyes I am the Gods and Monsters in this Eden made of blindness and willful naivety

Mother Dear,
I love you with a love that is uncertain, tentative, conditional as the sun in the sky
You broke my heart years ago.
you took my life, the one I wanted and ripped it up
you claimed I never loved anything that I did,  and never wanted to be with/see/love any of it, all of it again you claimed I asked you to do that

As if I didn't know my own head and my own words
You took away the horses that ran as fast as my thoughts, the books that reminded me that I wasn't truly alone, removed me from the friends like mirrors of my heart
and for the first time...I knew what it felt like to love nothing and be loved by no one.

I wrote I hated you, I starved myself to feel like you didn't own me and you took that from me too...taking away my journals, forcing me to eat when I would rather have allowed the bones to jut from my body in subtle defiance
You couldn't take the novels I wrote in my mind or the memories of those days, pieces of words and conversations forever circling back to haunt me like the ghosts that make you who you are

You made me a shell, a blank, southern, suburban wife in the making someone who disgusts me...but you are my mother and I can't hate you

I have to love you- even when the feeling is fleeting and I question it.

Your hair curls like mine you say and I can only imagine yours curling from the heated vapors frying in your brain all empty the way you want it
"Ignorance and bliss" you say and that is why you live in your tiny bowl of stupidity and joy- a hopeless optimism that angers me more than anything else.


I want to despise you sometimes and others I want to be your best friend
You have hurt me in ways that nothing else could ever compare to
but without you and your dedication of 87 days to a hospital bed, I would not be here at all
I do not know if I can handle looking at your eyes with my own or holding a hug for more than a moment but i know i always try
I must always try.

Moments pass with us in tune and as friends or even better a mother-and-daughter
not at war but at peace and it is nice
And then you say, your hair is too long, your shoulders or slumped or you need to lose weight and the feeling spirals and fragments like a million little snowflakes

no one feeling the same but all of them razor sharp
cutting me in jagged pieces of who I was and reshaping me into a girl, young and frightened, a girl who I do not recognize. A girl who I do not want to be

the pieces of your cold words bury themselves under my skin and
they rattle around in my mind long after they melt against the warmth of my anger

A million leaves rotate in a slow spiral to the ground already littered with the colors of autumn
the creek, frigid even in summer, flows as quickly, quietly as possible down to a creek larger in size, to a river, to the ocean eventually taking every laugh and tear with it
every summer from since ages before I was born i have been there generations laughed and cried and fell in love upon that creek, next to the campsite
Lot 47 was just a lot, it was wider, had bigger trees but it is just a site
a site where my grandparents loved each other more than life itself, where my dad laughed harder than he ever did at home, where mom learned to cook, where i got the scar on my ankle, where our names are illegally carved in the trees

where i learned to build a fire, hiked for miles, saw baby elk up close, fawns and bears.
Smokemont is just a place, a place of happiness and love and nostalgia of family and friends and a sense of forever
it is a place i will never go again but whenever i close my eyes and reach for peace it is the place i end up
with the smell of nanny's chili at dusk and coffee early in the cold humid mornings where mist rises off the creek like a magical fog seducing us in solitude and a quiet joy. The marshmallows roasted to a golden-y perfection every single night with Poppy telling stories and nanny squeezing into my chair wearing a navy blue hoodie and telling me to put on something warmer

Where i sit and read harry potter for hours, where we are all one again and when i open my eyes...poppy has sold the camper, nanny is buried with river rocks from lot 47, and we swear we won't go back without her

In my homeland I would sit and drink wine
I would look out over the coast, drink espresso in cafes, walk in mircowedges over cobblestone streets in tight brown pants and beautiful coats.
I would cook and bake and love and read and write, i would kiss my Nonna's cheek and speak with my hands.
But...
This is not my homeland and I do not drink wine
I drink beer from a keg, starbucks with pumpkin, and the coffee here is drunk sitting down.
I don't look over a coast but a concrete jungle of noise and smells that aren't fragrant or delicious
there is no kitchen for me to cook in my dorm and i wear nike shorts and bean boots and i feel this life is not a grand one

My homeland is not this place and indeed, nothing like this place and for that, i am grateful