at a desk
i remember it was raining, i was 4 years old.

my childhood yard is foggy and gray, muddy and inundated with moss and clover and bittercress.  the rabbits love mustard greens and nettle and under the chipped-paint back porch.  the swing-set grows lichen, rusted chains and leaf littered platforms.  neighborhood kids are scared to play on it, but it remains for the squirrels.  plastic windowpanes frame this view, childhood really isn't that bad.  there's just a lot i actively try not to remember while experiencing it.

we painted wooden trains because of my mother.  we did almost everything because of her.  and it was raining, such a good activity to do when we couldn't play outside.  what a wonderful problem to have, to have to paint wooden trains with those I love, because the flowers had to grow.

we painted the trains supernova colors or neat orderly lines.  now dust collects on them.  when are toys forgotten?  is it a gradual decline, or a sudden shift one day?  do they ever think it was their fault?  i need to play with them, move their paint-sealed lips.  so they were not created in vain, they can speak and breathe.

in the desk were muddled crayons and pencil shavings, journals i never knew what to do with.  everything smelled like those pencil boxes from school, of reforested cedar.  sharp and woody, how can i justify learning times tables with a reclaimed forest?  shiny gray graphite rubs off on my little hands.  i am little, and i am not.

around the desk were my mothers plants, some quietly hanging brass  bells in the frosted chandelier.  home is always full of glass, colors, rainbows, vintage mohogany and soft white cotton linens.  places i want to roll around on, analyze every seam like a fine art piece.  or someone in a mental asylum.  a historic place, where rabbits and crows and squirrels are buried in the yard.  a historic place, where grandfather dogs are sleeping under juniper bushes.  i remember their cardboard shoe boxes, the chain dangling from the unfinished basement ceiling's pipes.  nothing marks their graves but our memory, what is more beautiful than a mind's image?  an untitled art piece?

at that time the carpet was wall-to-wall, before dad ripped it up and we saw old nail holes like constellations under the basement ceiling.  the carpet was a ***** cream color i could dig my toes and fingers in.  what a good problem to still have baby toys, to have parents 40 years older than me.  to have time and to hold.  to love other people's children because i chose to explore and make art and make mistakes.  the baby toys haven't moved, a lot hasn't.  crystallized or petrified, how could i be that special to another person?

the trees were growing in the yard, but you don't realize what is temporary until you outgrow it... it was a hot summer and i was sitting in an old ford 1960 green XL that smelled like old gasoline and mold, decaying basketballs and leather baking in the sun.  i love everything about you, old friend.  i'm sorry my education cost your life.  im sorry i care and i don't make a lot of money, you sacrificed so much.  gray and white and black.  now we go back.

to the left of the desk, a mahogany cabinet with pinewood derby cars, preserved pink and white wedding flowers float in a glass dome, speckled glass hearts refract light quietly on the shelf, and model cars sit neatly stacked, locked away with an ornate key in the wooden bowl.  like my great grandmothers books, margaret, who was my mother's most beloved second mom.  i wish i knew when i was younger how much you meant to her.  we climbed on your grave where your husband's ashes were hidden.  i wish to cook with lots of crisco and live with my sister in a house with a white gravel driveway, alone, playing piano and painting.  the shattered kitchen floor linoleum and creaky attic fans in your old kentucky house are all that i have of you.  i'm sorry family politics destroyed that house you loved so much.  i love it now more than i would have ever guessed.

art crafted by 4 children shimmered on the walls with pencil marks and stickers, ceramic tiles above the fireplace we seldom lit.  it feels like a pool being rained on, slowly being added to while losing definition in the picture reflected back.  dog fur clouded the periphery of the staircase perpetually, what a good issue to have.  he overate and didnt go on enough walks and wasnt in our beds enough, where he wasn't allowed.  his ashes are being buried with my mom.

if only there was more time to sit and be bored, waiting to grow.  if only quality time was a commodity, not a luxury.  if only i unplugged this computer and fell asleep, thinking of nothing but open green trails lined with trillium and wildflowers, being outside and having time.  

i sat at my small wooden desk, facing the window where bunnies played.  bored and impatient, i made a mental note to remember what it feels like to be 4 years old.  i remember thinking about kangaroos, as if that was important.  looking back, it really was.  

i am now 25 years old.  time moves like sunset colors, don't wait an instant.  the lines on my face are monet's haystacks he kept going back to, the light constantly in flux.  i spend my time with 4 year olds, they play and eat and sleep.  i watch their faces, thinking of how old and young they seem.  i draw their outlines in crayola pencil for them, soon to be scribbled over.  how sweetly they annotate their likeness with my moments.  how aware and unaware.  i cradle them when they cry, dance with them when they're happy, read to them and sing to them.  i don't feel like i'm good at my job.  i care and i spend time with them, holding them and their strangeness.  i ask them questions and get swept away.  i follow stories and am healing.  i missed a lot, i tried to fit in and be quiet.  when did i start?  when do i stop?  with them, i can't help but be myself.  i have to.  

driving on the highway, my father pointed at a break in the clouds, sunlight spilling through onto a distant forested hillside.  "grace!"  he'd say, full of optimism.  i never asked, but is grace the gap in the clouds? the light, or the land receiving the light?  i want to weave my body through the ribbons of sunlight, hold them and tie a firm knot.  how it feels to feel.  to hold and be held, suspended, full of grace.  maybe someone went to heaven, maybe someone is being blessed.  hearing joy wash over my father's voice, we were definitely blessed.  we were already in heaven.  i'm already made of light, i come to realize.  take a photo, receive it.  be taken and given to.  my reflection again in your eyes.  yours in mine.

i want the mundanity the gory the true the real.  i can't live at a desk, i have to write i have to remember i have to feel.  i have to save them.  i feel no joy looking at screen, tapping keyboard, clicking mouse.  i watch a window, hear the pitter patter of rain, and finger-paint the same spot over and over again.  tap, tap, tap.
the voices talk to me.  (it's glitter paint, by the way.  and sisters are singing.)

i cried when my wisdom teeth were taken out piece by piece because my mom took care of me, like i was forgiven.  i need my guilt absolved.  i need to be held and to cry in a woman's arms.  the children fall and feel sad and lonely and call their mother's name.  never once an "our father".  i pick yellow flowers from the garden, put them at her place.

i am a mother and a daughter and a sister before all.  i've known this lesson for quite some time, and i am strong.  i have to be for them.  ******* donald trump is president and i have to be.  i have to be.  i have to be.  i have to be.  for HER.​  FOR HER.  FOR HER.  FOREVER FOR HER.

daylight diminishes with each passing day, golden sunlight bathes the early evenings with a subtle scent of warmth.  I trust that you are well.

snow begins to fall; it collects over the garden like antique film.  memories reorganize like the seasons.  i watch the garden through a gap in white curtains and become buried in the hibernation of ferns.  my mind can be sleeping and seeing.  withering velvet, muffled songs underground.  december light reclaims resonant summer heat, it echoes in blank pastel sky like a church bell.  

of all the many things in the little garden, i regard the ferns the most.  planted in my youth, we watch each other grow.  like an old friend, i talk to the darling ferns in my head about your memory.

coiled in fractal spirals, scenes gradually unfurl across the garden expanse in antediluvian ecologic masterpieces.  whispering buds relax their clenched fists in sunken earth and seek to taste light.  they capitulate when exposed to touch, bowing in my thoughts.

your green eyes captivate me; leaves that glow from within.  the colors stretch and soak in the sun, clairvoyant crystal gaze.  i see him in them, prophetic underclothing.  the garden expands and hooks to the fabric of the curtains, flickering from winter to spring.  

i have not seen another person in months.  i am not in the garden, the garden is me.  him.  leaves swell with my breath, growing and shrinking like the stars.

crystal ball

The morning air was cold in the forest.  
Sweeping black wisps in a microscope lens, her eyelashes outlined a delicately illuminated tapestry that reflected back.  When sunlight brushed them, a feathery frame changed; from crows flying to a gilded insect’s wing.  Laurel’s icy fingers fiddled the tubes, aquamarine humming with rusty umber.  In a warm mist of exhalation, dawn quietly unfolded into a cacophony of colors that flowed and collided in metamorphosis.  A self who is and is not - fluidly interconnected here nor there, alive nor dead.  Revelations echoed in the hall behind a closed door.  Falling asleep, the earth turned.  Waiting for wings, to remember or not.  Flutes echoed mournfully in the forest that day.

Late autumn leaves muddled under her boots as she stepped over dew-beaded clovers, eager for warmth.  Her canvas stretched across velvet pillowy mosses, crawling over pastel blue and pink linen rocks abundant with ancient fossils and lichen, phthalo and quinacridone.  Colors swam in waterfalls over the white noise.  Water wrapped each rounded stone like a gift, carrying the rains to elsewhere.  Tied together with root ladders of grandmother trees, who spoke quietly and whispered secrets.

She wondered who she would love, how many.  It was difficult to not be pulled back from here, now.  Now.  Now… Back then, soon.  It was difficult to think of anything else but this: the cells and molecules danced in the sun, exuberant, entirely animate.  They all called her name, over and under and in between.  Her limbs ached with longing and belonging.

The birds fell silent.  The hushing whoosh of water and wind lulled.  
Ornate filaments of starlight filtered through the last trails of fog.  Every inch of the forest was overflowing with love.  Colors moved independently of their origins.  She could stand here every day, chart all of the comets and meteors, earthworms and beetles.  The trees wrapped their boughs around her, reverent and wistful.  The art of existence is a radical, transcendental, immanent one.

Slowly, she became a tree.  To be regarded, to be kept.  Regarding, keeping.  Regardless of what happened in her story, she could lay down on the mosses and close her eyes.  Wild grasses would reclaim her heart.  Forest mice would build their nest in the cave of her ribs.  Love would go on.

She whispered her prayer to them, the mice.  Shadows slowly crawled.  The trees seemed to bend lower, listening, thinking.  She hummed a lullaby to the fog and the dew.  How she would see her friends again soon.  

Laurel recalled her first memory of dirt, gardening with her mother and overturning a stone.  Mesmerized, she drifted in thinking of her birth, her land, clover's grasses sprouting over her hands like clouds eclipsing the sun.  Something that didn’t hurt.  Maybe she would photosynthesize, warp the light around her body.  Become the light.  Heal.  Turn iridescent.  Make something new.

The thrush thrush thrushing of her brush on the cloth mirrored the contours, pushed the pigments into vibrant vibrations.

“Are you listening?” Laurel’s eyes drifted upwards, her painting half-finished.  The bristles clouded a glass of river water, clinking against the glass rim as sediment settled like smoke.  “Does this matter?”
We held your feet when you were born, bathed in us.  We remember.
Her irises stretched deep enough to swim in.  The forest held them in her hand like cool water.

A sunny patch of grass tilted into sunlight.  Sunlight tilted into a sunny patch of grass.  Laurel lifted her gaze, observed the highlight of each mountain and valley in her fingerprints.  The dirt from planting.  The body of earth.  She felt her own hands, twisting like gyroscopes.  Like parchment, she thought.  Scraped clean, hung, taught to dry.  Waiting for a divine word to be scrawled on them, charmed lilies proliferating the margins.  An illumination, an unveiling, an apocalypse?  The word of a god, punctuated by freckles and scars.  Unspoken, eyes closed under dirt.  There may not have been twice as many stars, but her book still felt light on her skin.

She did not question why one tree bent this way towards a patch of sun, or why the barks all felt different under her hand.  She accepted them for trees.  To be fossilized, to burn, to decay.  A fleeting thing, she embraced her verdancy.  The moss agate bookends were on the shelf with white painted trim.  Collecting dust, written, unwritten.  Known, unknown.

Turning the page, her arm swept over the sun, smearing light down to a glowing understory.

i want to sit next to my sister - we do not have to say anything --- do I recognize her as a near 30 year old? - i want to stop and curl and curve my body like a little conch shell - i want to hum like the ocean - the songs of infants - the hands of grandparents - i want to laugh on my death bed - surrounded by bugs and bees digging deep into pollen cradles, clawing and rolling in dust, rocking wind.

i want to braid my sister's freshly washed, cool, clean turquoise green hair.  it feels like it has been years since i did something so simple, so caring.  i want to sit and weave it until there is almost nothing left, but the silk aqua rope i can run my fingers down like water.  i want to thread the pieces over and under my heart strings.  she is the earth, the sky, the moon - the altars of rocks - the shapes we see in them.

///
i dreamt of a woman sleeping - she was made of sand - she was off the shore of new york city --- before the sky scrapers, streets, pandemonium --- with purple kelp for hair.  she was so beautiful - a sand bar, as big as a dune, beneath a thin layer of sun-warmed translucent water as open as day.   she was silent, laying like a fetus on her side under the waves.  i swam to her, held in on the loose sand like an anemone. \\

i want to sit on a warm rock in the sun - overlooking the valley, the lake, the blue mountains.  i want to be the Appalachian air - i want to do nothing - but to live.  i want to listen and dance and run and flow - join a coven, scale a cliff.  i want to talk to the night, watch birds and find mushrooms - follow magical, mysterious things.  oxblood berry juice runs down my fingers.

filling the bath up to the overflow drain - i want to fix the faucet.  spaces became smaller, memories overlap and forage in Michigan forests.  the sprawl and creep - moss inches glacially over our backs.  the spine remains on the island, the bogs embalm.  i sit sweetly, cross legged, twisting my hair around my finger - thinking of pebbles as road systems, sycamore and sumac houses.  the quietest, mildest evening sunlit place you could imagine bathed in green and gold, grace - lit and heaven - struck.  a place of peace, calm, warm.

i am thinking about the sound of the stream through the house, how we always can choose simpler.  i want permeable walls to the sunrise - to rain sounds - to the crickets and cicadas and spiders - to the smoke, the fog, the mountain laurel.  wild raspberries are wisps of cadmium red on raw canvas.  ducks fade in and out of graphite and watercolor drawings against the sky // buoyant on the pond, hawthorn and mugwort dreaming.

i want to see the flickering rainbow lights, sit on a fairy's wing.  sway and jump and spread my arms wide - wide - wider - up - up - and up!  iridescent, shining, on a beam of light.  i am lighter than air, i am the essence of light.  the memory of time.

a copper suncatcher eye, a fragmentation through a lens.  i want to sit - i want to rest and run backwards in my mind - upside down and through the channels of plants - tracing each petal of a daisy.  the circulatory system of green canopies.  i want to turn off and on again, i want to be shocked and taken to the sea.

the patterns take me, the colors soar.  i sit and feel the love from everything.  it is tangible, weaving itself between my fingers like yarn.

uncover my soul, tell me it is real?  i want to make - i want to remember - i want to plant, eat, grow.  i sit and revel at it all - my motherhood, my sisterhood, their daughters.  the womb, the darkness to light to the peat.

to live in a spiral bound sketchbook, in my great grandmother margaret's wooden, hand-painted pencil box.  i would make the memory of her love my home.  the piano keys float through open kentucky windows to the garden.

i tighten the knot, the bread rises in the corner of the kitchen.  i live in a place where i am but i am not - the story is told, i put together the pieces differently.  the forest shatters, i'm holding a piece of the mirror from 3 years ago.  it shimmers, cuts, fades, dissipates the bass neon jungle throughout the night - i find it all incredibly comforting and dizzying, being made of love to love to be loved.

the moon phases - arcs - dips - dives - toward you - through you - glowing, resonant, alive  //\||

on his birthday, a trick of the eye
a chime, lime green glimmering dark
slowly, a harp being plucked.  another chord - a melody unfolds.
buoyant hum -- the first of seasons, the first of firsts.

climbing the rocky, root-laddered hill, Sylvia's blackberrying echoes on my breath.  she frames the bakery courtyard, the home hill (an old couple planted daffodils under them, every year we cut some for our mother), and the bushes next to our apartment.  my foot arches around the curve of a root, and an oriole beams last rays of sunset as he darts into the dark.  cinnamon, caramel, and chocolate waft off my clothes.  they dance with the open, earthy, and full scent of her, encompassing.

intertwined, woven in the basket that held my mother's ribbons, our gratitude, and the elementary playground (we climbed the fence behind the basketball hoops, stretching to reach and shake the pale purple, sweet berries).  coils of gold, glitter, silk, satin, the handprint leaves, the gradient of small white to full purple bumpy pockets of sun.  such of tangible happiness I could hold it - twist it in my hands... even braid it into my daughter's long blonde hair.

we watch the mother and her three fawns, so close.  I can be happy anywhere if I see my friends.  rabbits, deer, lightning bugs, blackberries, dawn redwoods, and birds at dusk.  If I close my eyes I feel the earth, the prickly grass, and ants' expedition across my legs.  I remember.  like the first time, being called home for dinner.  overturn a rock, mesmerized by the traffic of roots, bugs, the city underground.  every day is something to cherish, to fill, to love, to share, to learn, to explore.

we are reborn in art. where the forest swallows the city horizon, a cocoon of peace.  I am always transforming.  a cool stream carved the valleys of Pittsburgh, beyond the plateau of the meadow hill and through the winding trails.  sisyphus's stone is a pile sand; the rocks are smooth as I turn them over in my hands, no jagged edges in my pocket.  my footprints fossilize, collaged with clover, fern, daisy.  a resonance that opens your heart - bathing in belonging.  the sounds, textures, smells, colors, and creatures welcome you here.

the museum of outside.  it was one woman who wanted it.  now it is everything.  the pictures in the gallery sit still - i tell my children that we can play pretend.  jump in the painting.  take a deep breath.  what do you smell?  flowers, pine trees.  what do you hear?  rushing water, birds, wind, frogs ribbiting.  what can you feel?  splash the cold, clear water - woo!   can a museum be a place of joy, exuberance, noise?  can we see everyone represented in it - even the smallest of creatures?  why have we done so much to be 'industrialized', 'civilized', 'developed', if we have sterilized, destroyed, polluted, and erased culture - intrinsically related to land?  

I say thank you to all the beings.  I say it out loud.  Sometimes I whisper.  Sometimes I am too awestruck to do anything but gaze.
I wonder if my presence transforms them, too.  I teach in the museum the next day, waiting to surrender back to the blanket of green.  from marble floors, satin walls, glittering crystal, and hand-painted ceilings, to holding hands.  playing.  running.  being wild.  whispering I love you to all.

the lightning bugs love the tree - they almost seem to follow our path home.  

𓆣 · 𓆨 · 𓆤 · 𓆦 · 𓆑 · 𖦹 ·

wild blueberries sprout in houses I’ve never been -
dusty rose candles illuminate oak boards like cherry blossom spring -
childhood dogs nest into your side -
with a sister you’ve never met sleeping across -
so close your hands could touch.

dried babies breath spray the corners of collaged vases -
newspaper scraps of 1992 -
lives lived like perfect texts -
stories imbued in every tree ring from the wedding cake stand, the lace, the cotton, the wool and cashmere and canopies and love of orchids, living unapologetically, ferns clouding the periphery of the yard where earth worms and potato bugs and lilac and lily of the valley call native ground.  

it’s easier to write of them,
wanting nothing than to be had,
having nothing but to want,
wanting everything yet nothing at all.

the sunlight tilts, rabbits play at dusk.  follow the tunnel of ferns -
the scent of green lushness opens forest floor.  
crows gather, cicadas hum.  stars come out one by one by one.  rather - eyes adjust -
we tilt, sway under ceramic bowl sky -
the earth eclipses the sun
living in totality or utter absence

we are not alone :
life is - indeed - the exception.