a love letter from being small and being on the floor: the space is warm and monumental and safe.  

who doesn't value floor time?  

pine box creaks with raindrop footfalls, warping windfall feeds deer amidst haunting gardens like chipped ancient acrylic beads muddled with dirt, dusty glitter, stories playing make believe planted below thick tangled roots of suburban grass.  
grow older, shade expands.  mosses reclaim urban forest floor, the ground is delightful like down.  the children can run around like intended, no white lace sunday stockings folded down.  the kitchen is finally cool, 30 years after pregnancy.
wait for spring.  take caution with entanglement outside of yourself.  
the next dinner where i am not utterly alone yet surrounded by everyone I love.  gratitude is a basic human need.  the sky and earth hold us delicately, the mountains and forests, animals and plants are ancestors whom we have been silenced from teaching.

hold me close but not too; from the floor I see it - the oven light in the old gas stove that's broken more times than we can fix, leather car seats time entombed and petrified mildew, sedimentary factory line notes bitten by grease and rust.  the memory of every first, everlasting moments.  the narrow claustrophobic essence of spirits ooze from the wall, thread the building like a needle.  a large circulatory system forged in steel and fire.  they crack and sizzle, smudging the newly buffed floor.  all I smell is fresh white globular paint, all I want is to talk to my mother.  really talk.  not watch the news, the monitor, the phone.  start good habits, maintain and flourish.  how do I say how beautiful she is?

I fold amaryllis arms around me, a ****** bud retracting from early snap frost, ghosted, blind and blanketed in frozen crusts of half-melted snow.  a numb burn.  they circle around, a bed with no tenant.  a child surrounded by ladybugs, an open sky, a happy sun and warm foothills with anthurium-red tomatoes that dad loves so much to plant for the summer.  

closing my eyes.  repeating leaven hands spin in circles around clay, lavender buds and poppy seeds
piloting rabbit shelters, mustard leaves and paper airplanes, laundry fairies and scout who never left her side.
rose and violet lace the edges of knives, piercing light entering fingers like egg whites escaping a nuclear yolk.  sinewy and embryonic, baths of sound and light.  I've always loved baby's breath, so why does it petrify me?  Putting on my pack and not looking back, feeling the acidic rejection in my legs with the altitude, yet the mental bliss of absolute newfound joy in out-and-backtrails.  I will carry all of it, do not worry.  i've been taught to leave no trace.

I step on her forgiving body, like room temperature butter.  she is sand, curled inward, shifting and shimmering seaweed undulates in shallow water like lyrics.  my footprints erase with the swiftness of etch-a-sketch indecisiveness.
We remark how warm, how beautiful, how strange it is to be here, but have no mark whatsoever.  occupy residency in a mind, one mind only.  to colonize a mind?  co-tenant a mind.  a tidal portal into whatever the ******* want, the coral, the anemones, the iridescent shells who pause and breathe "oooooh".  press fingerprints in the clay, dig in your nails, make the ocean yourself.  we have never been so utterly disconnected that the answer has always been intrinsic.  in the silt, the peat, the loam.  the roots take hold of mica, ore, the return of bridges and steel.  the calcified skeleton of ancient fish pressed in limestone.

shallow water, warmest on the surface, honeyed sand smooth like suede under toes and fingertips. sand crystals resist pressure of fists, clouds of nebulae, and dissolves to the ocean floor stardust.  my hand passes through hourglass Ophelia ashes, unyielding in a buoyant world.  every cell in my body sings home.

hair becomes slick and warm, not soft like seaweed.  the ocean inundates my mind, my mind is the ocean.  the sand is white cotton sheets.  

reaching the sand bar, the woman sleeping.  the tide approaches and recedes.  dizzying and safe in sunlight, photosynthesizing, breathing,

creating in a dream, slowly (or quickly) eroding away.