They ask which magic I’d choose-
not flight, not vanishing into air.
I want the old power,
the one Grandmother spoke of:
to call back all that’s gone,
to open the cedar door
into the room of lost things.
I’d find the turtle
I lost in the summer grass,
its shell etched with desert wind.
The story my best friend tore apart,
still trembling in her fists.
And my mother’s Pucci dress
green as cactus pads,
pale as celery,
wild as Kokopelli’s laughter.
Mommy, wear your dipsy-doodle dress,
begging, small hands tugging at her wrist.
I see the red-carpet stairs,
her laughing- Look, I’m on the red carpet
before the mountain swallowed the house whole.
Adult voices dropped into whispers:
trials, blood, ****** braided into coffee steam.
I breathed it in,
the way children once breathed poison
from arsenic wallpaper.
And then the house was gone.
But in the room of lost things,
the house stands again.
My mother waits at the piano,
head tilted in a model’s pose,
her green dress shining like emerald glass,
knee-high boots braced on red carpet.
From the shadowed corner steps the man
she kept in photographs.
Slowly, haltingly,
she takes my hand,
leads me not to him
but to my father-
the one who still sings in my blood,
the one who never forgets me.