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.

is a poem

a collective cognitive

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.

I thank the moon
sensuality and scrying in black clear pool
what veils keep
full disk brightens sheer membrane
lilies open
snowdrops retrace delicate steps
pull back fresh white sheets
morning arrival stretching growing resonating closing
departure shrinking suffocating apology
taken off in navy blue clouds
outline rainbow hallows
midnight clouds lift
sunset pollen constellations scatter
golden handmade paper
cut and torn seams
repurposed cloth covering
calm enough to fall asleep with
curled against her sweet face
I’ve never dreamt until a deer
casts a shadow on my shadow in dim blue light

I thank the moon

first was I was naked at night in the woods stepping into a cool little pond that was glowing & misty & then moss started growing up my legs & covering my body

second the moon was on earth the size of a beach ball & neon electric blue color - it was outside my bedroom window looking at me & radiating blue wavy ripples and covered the ground around me & went all over my body

endless tirades of drunken tea, 100% cotton or cashmere.  mahogany polished, spiraling printed hallways and open rafters, dry summer heat and white gravel driveways.  the love for the deafening, harrowing silent divide.  not a single measuring utensil in the kitchen.  write a letter, seal it, see it off.  the leader and only follower.  holding someone’s hand that isn’t a lover.  sleep in the same **** bed, thin and worn but the softest feathery pink threads.  earth’s pulse slows, a meditative house.  pluck haloed moon threads to braid ritual belief.  art is observing closely, within, slowly, away.  it is fast, fire, air.  it is every sacral deranged golden filament scattering in sun-caught beams and rays of listening acutely to ecological love songs. awake from dreaming, downstairs on the wooden stool before the early sunlight, the days and days for her and her.  brushing one head of hair became two, became the sisters she longed for.  the rituals we seek.

asserting sleepless wounds cut like a knife
indenting and pulling splinters from tables
it tastes of forest paths
fungi returning sky to syllables
acres of where
veils descend upon twirled twine
fraying between fingers
frantic
numbing
november rains writing cursive letters
fastening the earth
slanting struck match
l’épée of cedar within smoke
upon incense glow
they assemble reeds
in dying light, retreat, stories upon dreams upon memories within our never-ending

the wall fell away: sun evaporates landscape, the cars, the ever present concrete, orchids resurrect inside, clawing fern wallpaper flowering baby’s breath doused in illustrious orange light thick as down blankets
graphite illuminates curves of bodies, a womb and a heart, 1063 degrees of interconnected

living in a greenhouse, northern frosted January feathers wood paneled, southern carpeted floor
salt covered opaque film
musty smell of ancestral altars
pianos tuned in the last century sing Austrian lullabies, purple wood peeled back, smiling gaps of teeth veneer cinnamon hues
the spirits of those we never met
but share cupids bow, brown eyes, high cheekbones,
the hunt for the perfect wine cap

the daughter will have a daughter, the sun crests over the mortar, up delicate tendrils of transpiring verdant circumnavigators
it’s midnight and the sun hasn’t moved an inch —// it spreads between webs of fingers, behind my teeth.  pulsing red clay with fingerprints, rabbit tracks, deer paths carving the canyon as spirits float by ‘’’
attune to them, sulfur in the dark

winter threads needle’s eye
turning wheels again and daughter knows
what grandmother thought
of sumac and dogbane, oxeye daisy and lemon balm
crescent moons imbedded in palms,
striped shells from freshwater creek click against teeth
trusted within sand, ever-present spine, joining figments and childhood never-ending
sand spills through fingers, breath before the ocean, terracotta speckling periphery of view

I can imagine, now, what she sounds like

i open voices
singing lights
photographs have strings
lingering loud and open

i ring the moon
hollow and bright ceramic fruit
guitar crickets linger
the night, the moon, a deep night read aloud.

strings and lights and drives
carve open your voice
hallowed stars swallowed whole

skin, so
carry all meadows
lingering, souls grow
reluctant to sweetness
wayward hauntings
age for it all
astray, longing
to untitle your name

.

shattered green on the gym floor, shells from the ocean pulled by the tides. staircases spiral down and down and until they wait for you. small windows open and close and an ocean flashes with black and white credits, zooming in and out and wrapped up in colorful patchwork quilts. air conditioning hums and churns bits of dust in the vents, pine needles shift in the reflection of sandblasted windows. the ocean is near now. I can smell the salt, the brine in the passageway of my lungs. the ghost of the ocean is my hands, the swaying trees, the circadian boxes of leaves. transparencies through water blend color memory, the recall of fossilized love. ancient creatures roam the depths of the hallway, far underneath the strata of the canyon we call home. they float and glow and survey the depths of rock, water, sand, and seams of light to resurface on a sunny day in the riverbed. carved by water, we enter light. and stretch the calcified seams from which we were woven.

escape - Midnight grapefruit - hung like a light -

- caves of body - I think - shadows nearing - my dream was watching a war happen -

- Leaves of paper - tenderness of rain - beautifully redundant -

- In openness - safe - mirror moon - precious loft beds and tapestries -

- exploding light fractals of energy - looked at stars- nostalgic peace

- blue cold - under waves of color - whole cities fell -

- Intoxication of creative - fragile mistakes shape reality - so far, -

eight and a third of a minute is all it takes: light is memory.  it is awake. it greens the forest. remembers energy.

     hysteric tenderness, hostile touch.

dilated eyes, bronzed flesh, i am painted in all colors unseen.  
     solar heat dilutes 8 and a third of a minute of memory.

eyes closed, i sit beside you with my bare sun-warmed legs crossed on a picnic blanket.  

     fruit shrivels under cloudless light.  

your silhouette burns red behind my eyelids: my image returns 8 and a third of a minute later to a dark room.  

     the iridescent path led to you.

breakfast oranges
breakfast at golden hour
breakfast at 5:30 pm
in bed **** with legs
stretched in sunlight
feeling the shadows of curtains
breakfast oranges and sunlight for dinner

february waits
thinking of me
when they are normal again
and the doors will be off
off off off
and the sun will be on
sun sun sun
and the sun will be gold
in the soul
and my oranges
rest on the bed
in the sun

Underglazed silent hours, color gently stitch glow
On blue spinning wheels, mauve clouds pull like a sheet
Tumbling brushstroke breathing, pointing pastel beads sky and garden:
Seeing without seeing, life emerges
an empty third floor apartment with a cat, a girl, and plants
most occupancy – her hands that tell stories
turn the white canvas like autumn; the page of a book

double exposed –
when the apple, pear, and azaleas bloomed
the shutter speed raced like a heartbreak
and we walked in the hills next to home,
the gold stretching after winter’s shadow
daffodil laughter, a time when you were where I am now –
and light twisted through sisterhood’s soul,
a perfume motherhood in turn.
We walked through the rubble of the school, the giant mound of rocks and twisted metal.
On the bridge of a fallen tree – through the scaffolding of an old parking lot.
Magnolia flowers pierced with a pocketknife.
Pittsburgh spring, lilacs and ferns. Memories overlaid like negatives in water.

Self consciousness1, flowers buried under the dirt of the garden.  Stream through the house, a lover’s whisper5.  April mothers, remember medications.  Sleeping curls, sunlight vignettes8.  Every word, every note.


  1Handbook of I Love You, Third Edition

  5Community Studies on Letter Writing

  8Concise Guides to Roses, Polaroids, and London Fogs

deeply 40 years apart
1:54

< notes ...
remembering
a list of good things
like the grocery receipt thrown on your fathers empty table in a sunny afternoon of his early adulthood,
wondering about what his parents were thinking when they were his age ---
writing as re-experiencing his memories,
a million miracles drip from a faucet in the house he rented ---
reality is how we decide to read it
or what i've drawn behind cabinet doors, late nights, phone calls.
sleepless papers and chocolate chip cookies and words dreamt out of open windows
concentrating on the good things ---
a chemical, she interacts with us the same no matter your thoughts
waiting for coffee to bloom, brining you watre in bed, locking the door at night knowing everyone is home.
simple precious tangled moments
we are listening to muffled through the walls
hearing footsteps of your family on the old wooden stairs
these are the most healing

sage green safe place, burning sage and mint to clean my bad dreams. sage green bedsheets, knitting a scarf the color of sage green eyes. I went on a walk in sea foam forests, every hue of green lifting me from my sleepless dreams. sea glass on the shore next to the sage green forest, an opal haven.   omens sent to me from safety, to my protected place, I light a candle on the green table cloth, a mirror reflecting trees, ferns crawling in the bright corners of the safe silent house.  blue green bottles line the counter next to the stove, where we keep our lemons.  mint smoke lifts in the green room, reflects in the green glass door.

Up all night until the sun was still below the horizon, I waited for the medication, the slow burn of anesthesia in the cradle of my arm, the quick sleep where it wasn’t drifting, but an expanse that deepened around my irises and low in my belly as the white room darkened to green-blue, the freshly warmed sheets from the dryer placed on me by a stranger, the blood dripped down my arm as I closed my eyes; here is where I am empty, where an eclipse of unseeing determines the wide inquisitive canyons of impact within a single point, sedated wildflowers hung still in the dripping silence, and sunlight slowed through lace curtains on winter landscapes of uncovered shoulders.

a small kitten with one eye... sitting on the floor of a bookstore for hours.... a sunny day on an empty street in Baltimore... quiet gardens in glass boxes... warm desert bodies strung on the walls... in your hands... a ripe orange balanced delicately in slow light... shallow dark water with koi... a wall of orchids extending with ferns... we smell them on our tippy toes... the light was honeyed, indelible, embroidering our gaze...

pajamas in a museum... mirror mosaics on a wall outside the train station... frigid air removed our breaths... hot cider with cinnamon under colored lights... our fingers were close to thawing... her beige wool scarf... reminding me of my mother...

Soft brown bedsheets... canvases dripping with color... a memorial on the fifth... across the water, a skyline glitters as he holds the intimate illusion in his eye... without damage or harm... satisfied without seeing... we ran through tunnels of spiraling light like following the pen of a child’s drawing... an art that is faithful to yourself, not others, not the narrative...

flowers for my mother, it’s nice to hear the voice again…

lift heavy mossy beds, our golden depth…

it’s today, it’s bright, its continuous summer,

thread tugged from hot wax.  

quilting leaves, gentle and warm home breath.



sounds of water rushes words on skin, evaporate in lungs.

windows sit in windows until they are opened,

until they are opened and swiveled and creased on the edges.  

moss on fingertips.



a rabbit entered my dream like the smell of rain –

thunderous rushing sound -

anthropocene buried in a new bed.  Pause.



painting water on backs of hands,

sun dried thoughts return to lungs and yield ferns in the yard.

the first tomato harvest of the season.

they stretch the shade, slow light down.  

last garden rows on a crescent moon.



dans un reve, tu m’aimes.

dans un reve, le ciel et rose

dans un reve, tu m’aimes

et je ne saigne jamais



hieroglyphics sing inside limbs, absent and changing, dividing, growing

why do they make the strange art?  When will time stop?

being lived and lived again, being told about stories

find emerald home reclaimed



within the final days, she said

the stars are unseen

an eye closing on sunlight water

in naked tenderness, humble and gardening open air

visible but cannot be touched,

plant into the earth.  resume.

profound and rich memories carved out in pen and pencil

moss grows newly made bed.

We have been silent for the whole time I’ve been awake
Since the stars slowly faded
And we drove to the park
Under a white construction paper moon
Harmonies of watercolor hills,
Turning pages of blanket clouds
Panorama lover skies.

While her spirit still lingers in the forest,
Her and I will reunite
Under a ladder,
A constellation,
A renewed childhood
Another two years from now.

Magnolia and dogwood flowers
Say our names over and over
As they delicately pause time  
Their petals run and play
Catch in the field.

Golden light leaks through lace
And touches his sleeping eyes
Dreaming of early morning
Bird singing like a newborn.


The leaves of the painting slow their ecologic song,
Rendering the negative cool blue a cohesive orange yellow sky.
The hills unhinge themselves from the borders of the frame,
As the rabbits return to their burrows,
Brushes washed; the homage of colors slip down the drain.


All that remains is the sketch of her ghost, a hazy white anatomy of corners, planes, indications of form:
A spine, her hands, quietly strong features.


To ghosts, what is a forest?  A canvas?  A feeling other than the wind?
A memory or reality?


I regard the painting, the forest, the woman.
She becomes younger as I do.

Small video collages of opening eyes
Neurons firing and  
Right times in right places.
Homes painted after hospital beds.

What else?

Every minute of the dream was the brightest orange sunrise
We were camping in the middle of the field
I looked at you inverted,
Accepting what we already knew.



My heart is split in different places.

Some days in crowded streets,
Loud restaurants,
Drunk wedding receptions,
Laying on the grass,

   I look at my hands.
   They move in light and shadow
   Trompe l’oeil religion.
    
If I see them,
Believe in them,
Or trust them?

The canvas,  
The beach,  
The borderline,
The liminal space where my body is  

[mine]

A pause in rain
A book as company
The beach full of families

Cairns on an empty beach
To remind the waves
The flat grisaille rocks,
Mosaic crushed shells
Of the steps I took to the lake.

From the beach full of families,
Through a driftwood jungle,
To the empty apartment fold out bed.
Blinds that cut the red setting sun  
Into striations of hunger,
Waning trees on the third floor  
An echoing chamber
Open apartment balcony.

Rain on the night highway
Like constellations  
Guiding me at sea
Agitated sleep in a field of asphalt  
Fluorescent ribs on the grey car interior

Crossing state borders,
Into purple 6am skies
The sunlight starts the engine,  
Warming me from sleeping town cafes

The state park is empty this early
As light tilts from under the bridge
Empty roads and seagulls  
I start walking to keep the image untouched
10 miles later, I’ve seen redemption
In turquoise water
And concrete caverns  

I spread a blanket on the grass under a willow tree.
This is a scene I will paint---






I open my book, regarding the glass surface of the water.
Century-old footsteps listen to the shoreline,
The ancient murmurs connecting  
freedom from servitude  

I feel the cool water surround their feet
As they leave all they’ve ever known
Into a new country,
Sending a love letter to their family.

As I look up from my book,
Where they once stood,
Strangers smoke under the trees.

I sit next to small crescent shadows
Delightful celestial fragments
Soak the ground under the tree

There are people in the lake:
Swimming into the obscured lagoon
Totality opens as crickets start to sing
  Awakening a brief transition into twilight
The lake is still as gazes draw upward,
Separating ourselves from the earth
Eclipse watchers float in the serene.

    



It was the day when shattered plate shadows spread like the root system of a tree
Across the country and onto my wooden front porch


I was 18
Our shadows sewn together on the earth.

I write letters,
Painted during golden hour.  Dimmer in the trees.  I must remind myself of it.
Walking up the fire escape and looking at the stars, I knock on the window, he looks gentler.
The most beautiful day here yet; the colors break down from pixels to prayers.
In person, virtual, ambivalent depths of shadow.
Peaceful and sincere, I need the essence of it.



I hope you’re having peaceful dreams,  
Smoke from burning mint,
Shakey & slow
Push energy back in me
What speaks colors in you

An oil spill underneath the ceiling light,
When you close your eyes, I am sunlight on water.
The reflection of my tears were colors
Gentle reminders to love.

If you ever miss me remember I didn’t walk away,  
I laid on the grass in the sun & watched the clouds,
Building cairns in the stream.


I was painting on the floor in your room,
It was raining in the basement hallway outside.
The walls were mirrors,
Trees and vines grew up your white walls
A foggy night and a stream formed outside your window
Where I snow fall for the first time.

A few days before summer break,
We went cliff jumping and it was warm again.

It is always lightly raining with open windows when we sleep together
There will always be more growing and learning
In your absence.

The sun is setting and I’m not alone—
We hiked to the middle of the Appalachian trail,
I don’t know who I am  
But the colors are moving
Nothing has felt so pristine.

On top of white rocks,
This is not a dream.  
A ridgeline where we lay our coats on the diagonal granite
Hands lightly touch on cold stone
Over pristine valleys of moving trees
Stretching from the blue ridge mountains.

My heart is not falling—it is ascending  
Like the summit,
Like the valley below
Floating in space
On the spirit of boulders, we scramble up with open hands.
Covered in delicate bonsai roots
Connecting the longest trail in the world,
Two thousand miles between us but we’ve never been closer
   In a warm car, floral turtlenecks, squares of paper
  I close my eyes because it’s too much
And the sun is gone.

Waiting as the leaves float above us  
Delicate joints forgive gravity
As the ground shifts beneath  
Bed of grass

Are you happy?  The wind is blowing north.  You are not a burden.

Warm sassafras earthen outlines
Wispy milkweed nebula within the path
Leaping into further fields,
Splendid happenings in our house of clay,
Sculptures of pure weightlessness.

The rain will come at 4, so we watch the field.
Like the early morning,
The first night,
The windows down, the hills, the trees, feeling safe, feeling missing, feeling music  
Shimmer down the back of my neck.  
Feeling isolation, too little, too much, nothing, everything.  
Meanings are alienated: her ideas connected to mine.
Ambient colors blend in swatches of light.  
The artist stands up, spills the paint, smears the light.
Art is for souls written in silhouettes.



We run barefoot in grass,
Towards the approaching gray
Blades cling to glistening legs like strikethrough text.
Self and ego unite
Thoughts drift as leaves suspended in the rising stream
This rain is an unfinished thought.

The pressure change comes like a broken bone.  
Trillium wildflowers parallel the ravine
Delicate white bodies bend
As warmth is pushed higher,
Water condenses and falls:

Time is places and places are time
Sleeping in old beds,  
Scents of warmth,  
Snow collected over antique film
A garden buried in hibernation,
Sleeping yet seeing
Withering velvet songs underground
Echo in pastel church bell skies.
They taste of light,  
They dream of dawn.
I am not in the garden, it is myself.  It is him.
The cathedral glass swells,
Growing and shrinking like the stars.


Memories  
of dancing in the  
kitchen, steam from boiling pots  
of water hanging on  
windows open to  
pine trees,  
muffled songs.  


Memories of falls petrified in ice.  We climbed a fire tower, slipping between steep planks of lumber to the top of the fall sunset, the moonrise, a red disk on the open horizon.  
He is playing chess.  My mind is quiet.  I have made my bed.
The colors stretch into a fine line- white light permeates the new home.

A small area of wooded shelter,
Hammocks in the sun, a warm fire with toasted sandwiches and beer,
It was where the rabbits chose to laze this evening.

The sky reflects in the muddy pools of our sticky footprints:  
The last mark of my being.
The air will diffuse into my body like a vaccine,
A warm bath,
Falling asleep.

Its quiet and her cuts have been cleaned.

Descend
Like a particle of dust
…
..
.
Landing on a *****,
A steep curve sharp as a knife.
A white car, backpacks, a guitar,
Sing life to the rims of the empty canyon
The sound returns  
It echoes like circadian drums.
A chasm, a fold in your bedsheets,
The space between you and your mother.
It divulges words of a great marble book,
Dialogue in dissonance
Pages upturned, eager to be read by the sun.
We run our hands along  
Stories carved in this valley of jaggedness,
Seeking horizon lines  
Under oceans of stone.
Mist falls
Through the sleeping cusp
between two gray shale wings
of the deepest river canyon,
Weaving strings of glacial waters
Like topographic canticles.

An internal breathlessness
Guides us by maps written
In shards of glass.
Rhythms of instinct
Pull me forward
Yet the blade on her hand
Collapses me in
profound solitude.
.

The desert during a heat wave,
Quiet browns and reds,
Sandy rock for miles and miles and miles.
We sit in havens of shade beneath hanging rocks,
Socks prickled with cactus needles.
This windswept planet foreign from rainy eastern green.

Waiting until the hostile angle of the sun lowers to the crux of the mountains,
Shadows extend as jackrabbits skirt around us.  
Les fougères poussent bien à l’ombre.

We climb on top of the tallest hill,
Backs on hard uneven sandstone,
Covered in petroglyphs, we look up.
The stars begin slowly, then all at once.
Salt spilling on black paper, the arch of Orion’s arm
Whirls near Sagittarius and Perseus.
26,000 Light years from her,
Swirling in the dark.
The wind said,
This is now the place for you:
Our galaxy, a heaven.
The stars, a liturgy.
My desert, a temple.

Walking trails my ancestor mapped,
Moss covers our sandals in the  
High sequoia forest.

On the crest of a ravine into a lake,
Inside a cloud,
A black dog follows our path.
Quiet gazes of deer meet us beyond rushing creek beds.
We’ve been awake since sunrise.  

I run off trail, alone.
Hiking up and up until there is  
No one.  
I take of my clothes and bathe in the cool water, the sun, the trees, the mountain, the air.

Waiting for no one who is coming, have I ever been more than anything but mortal?

I wish someone would have protected you,
I wish anyone would have protected you.

The sunlight warms my skin.
We will never be close again.
And I’d rather be here, alone, alone, alone, than hurt you.

Small movements lift white sheer curtains,
As I sit at kitchen tables in silence,

Rain touches the window like a morning kiss,
Pulling me from a dream, or a seance by a string.
The breeze navigates the house like a breath or a flood:
Silk falling from silk,  
Words falling from bridges,
This air is a pleasant dream.

Choose what is real or not,
Resurrect lingering memories like  
Transparent negatives overlaid in your hands:
There is a light and dark,
But an inverse of each.
Sewn together in a warm mess,
Liquid and melting light in time
Habitually, it drips from your fingers
Like rituals of burying artifacts
Far beneath the sun.








Before the leaves fell and the frost protected thoughts in a numb glaze,
I fell into the steam of chamomile tea,  
Pervasive yellow sweetened air
Swimming through medicated words like a needle before surgery,
A silence that amputates and eradicates
Hauntings of resurrection.

Two candles on a mirror.
Lighter clicks, sparks, reflects.
Dual realities.
Two sisters, burning from
Separated souls.


A gold coin widens slowly with heat,  
the room bathes in energy, clear and warm.  


Heartbeats flicker over white canvas sonograms.  
Evening light spills from the horizon,
An overturned glass of iridescent breath.  
Clouds hover like a ghost, a new melody of space.  

I blow candles out.  
Their love remains.





Under the mirror, the memory of light unfolds, a mitosis of energy.  I regard the extinguished flame, tranquil smoke running through the room like a prayer.  Under the wooden table, a carving with the initials of his name.


The love wanders to your open hands.  They move and smear with oil paint, mixing the sage green tablecloth, kinetic orange heats a canvas.


Nothing is the same
Relaxing, water replaces air
Everything is different now.
Nothing is the same.

Sunlight still leaks from the window like  
Dripping faucets against a clogged drain.  Her hair was turning blonde again, like when they were younger.
Humming, she was
Remembering his hands



















An emotional limbo where forgiveness waits
Intermediate neglect in oblivion
Lapsing into another’s life,
What’s inside you is not like anyone else
Every instant, a new reflection

More than sinking, less than swimming

Float on,  float on,  float on,  float away

I wonder what opaque transition of sight
Will allow us to exist?  
Upside down, lights up, sheets drawn,


Where you and I can meet halfway.


Lyrics of inorganic hymns emerge
Rationing daylight, resurrecting Eden in his eye -  
Sisterhood is a ghost of the seasons.

Written on your palms in
Smoldering greens to golds,
Bronze ferns purify  
Fragile angelic steps
As we step into the water.

Silver cotton grass frames the trail we walk.  
Sunlight adhering to skin,  
Condensing memories.





I do not want to remember us this way—

Toxicity hissing from floodlit walls

Filtering body and soul into—

how or when we love each other.




Masculine figures melt into the painting.  Silence resonates as they die.  

Dew collects on the leaves.  They slide down to the earth and surround the bodies.

A gold cut glows from under the doorway,
It saturates illuminated stitches.

The room was clean.  And she was painting.
I’ll always remember her.

I wrote your words on porcelain leaves
Petrified in lucid air
Shimmering like wounds
In true light, I paint  
Illusory rendered responses

Who’s to say the scene is not real – she speaks, breathes, walks in light?  My hands?  Her soul between the leaves?  
Belief in what?  
A reflective gospel.

Palette altars scatter the earth.  
Habituative, neurotic wildflowers  
Crawl from mirrored pools inverted in innocence,
Inviolate rhythms, hymns of absence.

Les fleurs suivent avec tous les pas que tu prends
et tout ce qu'ils fleurissent
Elle m’aime un peu, beaucoup, passionnément, a la folie, pas de tout /

The leaves are falling, they shatter form syllables of your voice.
















It is in itself,

[As I look at her ghost]

Love, I am already in the ground.

There is a ladder in the woods,
A tall V pointing up, four trees connected  
Unwound DNA of our bodies  
dreams of intertwining above the sun.

Two sisters climb down either side,
Metal feet spear painted leaves.

There is a forest between the ladder,
And beyond, a glassless window of autumn.
Fallen leaves like angels’ slender bodies
Reading in the dirt; old wine and stale memories rinsing their mouths.

Painted leaves sway above us like cathedral glass

They categorize memories of light
Illuminating ripe windfall on forest floor

She walks South from the setting sun,
Blonde hair bathed in colors of heaven
A boy follows her path with an orange cat

Where is the wilderness of childhood?  
The time spent where you and I were together,  
trapped, open yet closed?

The canvas glows fervently  
Wandering between blind contours of trees
Arms outstretched; feet bare
Toes drift on warm earth.

What did I say to him?

It's been four years
And I still wear our rings

But im forgetting about him
He doesn’t visit my dreams anymore
Melodies of his laughter,
his steady heartbeats,
his soft breathing
replaced by grainy voicemails on repeat repeat repeat
I     wish     I     could     touch     you     again

12% beer on her front porch planting flowers on valentines day,
Remembering the short-cut on the running trail
Heatstroke and search parties
Ravines swallow last goodbyes.

A new and empty house
Unassembled furniture
You died on a Wednesday
And I told you:
“you better not leave me to do this alone.  I can’t do this by myself”
I look at the disembodied, sprawling collage of wood on the floor.

“I can’t do this by myself”

All that responds in the empty house is deafening static before the voicemail cuts.

here is an empty sky.







i can’t remember the rain________
a ghost softens my thoughts
on cotton horizon bedsheets
sun and moon eclipsed by rainstorm.
they watch me from the porch //

// lilac warmth sweetens air
grown from back porch memories
sun brewed tea with sugar
next to a withering green mailbox
and grassy hill
small painted hands splatter the garage
chalk covered red brick
i watch the empty sky.
_______it regards me delicately



and I fall sleep in the sun.

I walk down the empty sidewalk, south towards the city light.  
Golden ice glass covers twigs and still born buds like a hypothermic glaze
Claustrophobic and sterile, preserved sacred artifacts
Your clothes crucify against me like hot water we showered under, unfiltered winter sun; learning what peace is.
She’s on the phone, paper cut thighs.  We slept in the same bed last night, warming the sheets.  I keep you close so you don’t have to.
Tattoos of bookmarks, her quiet voice gravitating the landscape like starlight silken water; keeps the planets pinned in place behind dust collected charcoal sky.
Rhythmical beauty of cluttered strange songlike beauty,
Luminescent trees bow to the collage of rippling temperate light
Wearing my clothes and memories like the stories that saturate the senses
Monuments of scraps on display,
Crepitating stiff fabric frosts over on the surface,
My voice permeates the stitches
Like the mild toxicity of long-lost lovers.
Sedated neutral placidity, a rare syzygy

Blackout night blackout poetry, streetlight washed porcelain
Scrubs clean the severity of tenebrous light and shadow
Tender rain delicately succumbs to snow
Absent cold universe of separation
Melts upon collision with wet stone
These fallen angels rest peacefully now in the empty dark
Adumbral and indistinct, illusionistic tame dreams
Have mercy... for I’ve just begun to learn to dress for the weather.  

So --- I’ll blow on your tea while its too hot --- the warmth spreading from my fingertips --- to yours.  Green leaves, translucent gems bobbing in jade water.  Make you warm breakfast in the morning, your half-sleep cuddling into my side, reaching through layers of warm blankets.
--- I had begun to forget my walk last night.

It was nearing the end of the rainy season. Steady downpours muted all other sounds of the village, the time when everyone slept soundly through the night. The rain had not stopped for weeks, until today. Khadisa woke up before sunrise again, to the smell of cool fresh air, no humid chaleur. She remembered the dream, a girl standing behind a waterfall. She said she could hear her voice, but not make out the words. And the water turned into doves, their flapping wings like beating drums. She started dancing to their music, and blood trickled down her arms and legs in the moonlight.
She uncocooned herself from the medley of blankets, warm tangled sheets still playing hushed reruns of her dreams like seashells reciting ocean lullabies long after the tide. She untucked the mosquito net from under her mattress and silently pulled on her sandals and coat as to not wake her roommate. Mariama was still asleep. Khadisa looked over her shoulder to see her friend nestled into the warm pool of the missing body under covers from where she laid, burrowing unconsciously into her ghost. The amber light of the hallway spilled into the dark room like cream rendering black coffee lucid as the sunrise still hours away. She preferred nights like these, when her husband was away.

“Come back and sleep?” inquired a small voice from a pillowy soft, dream-like haze.
“I’ll be back. En bimbi, Mariama.”

Mariama’s birthmark was just visible from under the covers on her petite frame, an angel on her shoulder flying towards the heavens, to her curly bronze sun-kissed hair and constellation freckles. A memento mori of Icarus before the fall. She was not her blood, but she treated Mariama as a sister, a missing half of herself that had been long forgotten.

XXXXX

I wake as if underwater, neon light and sound blurry like I’m underneath a murky lake. My head throbs. Long tendrils of seaweed bodies sway in foggy currents of flashing, turning, strident beams of light. I’m ascending, body buoyant without weight, as I try to move my numb limbs. What did I take? I look at my hands, the smears of fluorescent orange paint and powder. I just wanted to be free, to fly. Feel the wind, soaring down the mountain path on the back of Mariama’s moto. I stretch my arms out, close my eyes and become the air itself: drifting, unattached.
XXXXX

Guided by light of the full moon and Venus rising, Khadi eased the door shut behind her into the latch with a gentle gratifying “click”. I’m never in the same or different places, but I am good company regardless. I depart as air, a constellation rising. She paused and listened to the morning. Epiphanic night colors divulged to her the secrets of sleep-singing crickets, dream-dancing of cassava leaves, crystal-painting of morning grass. She recited the symphonic canticle with her footfalls on the uneven gravel path to the well, the delicate sway of cotton as she walked in the occasional whistling paths of mosquitos. Soaked in tepid moonlight overflowing from the frame of the mountain Chien Qui Fume, she turned off the path into a grove of trees towards the river, and felt like she was disappearing back into the dark.

xxxxx

“another nuit blanche, huh… or should I say matin? The two must be the same at this point for you now. Just a perpetual, non-stop existence.” Mariam added skeptically, eying Khadi over a steaming cup of ginger tea. The wood from the fire crackled, as if in agreement.

“At least you have hot water for breakfast. Anyway, I am used to waking before sunup to prepare food for the family before the hospital shift.” Khadisah added, “I’ll be fine, habibti. No worries.”

“I know your dreams are getting bad again. Hunde kala e saa’i mun. Everything in its own time. Take care of yourself first, for once.”

She struck a match without reply, lit the candles, and poured herself a second cup of tea. Mango flowers unfolded outside the kitchen window, drinking in the early morning warmth with dusty yellow hands opening to heaven. She held the matchstick and watched the flame approach her fingers, remembering the countless needles she has sterilized to perform surgeries even the male doctors were too uneasy to attempt.

“So, what grand prophecies did I miss in the stars this morning?” Mariama put on her glasses and slid them up over the bridge of her nose with her index finger.

“The usual 3am omens, no bad spirits.”

Mari hummed a little hymn to herself and half-smiled as her green eyes flicked downward to her open book and wordlessly melted away any tension as if she were the effortless break of dawn dissipating a mere cloud of morning fog.

Xxxxx

A songbird starts singing a clear soaring cadence. And I am falling back below inundated shallows. I feel her soft blonde hair on my face, her colors warm and sunny. My name over and over and over. She’s shaking me, but I can’t speak. Her voice is perfect, it is all I hear anymore. Mariama with ivory skin, pastel hair. A ghost? No, a child. No more muted ringing in my ears. I melt into her as everything goes black.
My father was kind, unlike most from where we’re from. The kind do not live long enough. Walking in tall grass before a storm, the wind would whip at us in riotous orchestral gusts; I spread my wings and let the weight of air lift me away into the music. I closed my eyes, face upturned to the swelling rainclouds with pregnant bellies. “My Khadisah’s a little bird! Keep spreading your wings, and you’ll fly across the sea to America one day,” he said in French, the language for educated men.
xxxxx

Prep is the hardest stage for projects. Mariama starts in the cold shop, mapping out the light and colors, the size and shape she’ll be sculpting with. When it comes to the glory holes, something else takes over. She was a fote, of mixed blood. From a family who supported her education, her liberty. She thought of Khadisah’s upbringing, pushed the thought from her head as she focused on the heat of the furnace, the twist on the yoke, and the heavy grounding of the pipe. The sound of the port outside the open studio window grounded her, Conakry’s canoes readying their nets, bobbing in the sunrise stained glassy waters. Khadisah is sea glass, she thought. She heals others as she cannot heal herself, a polished stone ever-changing, and strong to the core. Shaped by something bigger, without choice. Although, the fact that there is no true place for us is shattering. But we’ve learned to live with jagged edges, smoothed them in buckets of the rains we’ve carried for miles on miles. Words can be shrapnel, written of the body, in perpetual ancient gestures. Looking down at the glass on her worktable, thin frames of women curved in dance like limbs of a tree in a whirlwind. ****** hieroglyphics speak of the writhing societal inconsistencies, the murky waters from which we fill our cups. The scars in their hearts built by the privileged, defiling bodies and souls without consent.

They are the ones who do the slaughtering.

xxxxx

“I have always loved mythology,” remarked Mari after perusing a chapter or two of her novel. It was a miracle alone that she knew how to read. “Shame that we lost so many of our stories, women.” Khadi had lost track of time, meditating on her morning rituals. She glanced at the positioning of the rising sun on the burning horizon through gaps of light through red kaleidoscopic trees.
“Next time bring me with you,” Mariama suggested, tapping her temple and pointing to me. “To your walking dreams, I mean. Wherever the night spirits guide you when all other men are sleeping, and the world is entirely ours for the taking.”

Khadisah’s gaze fixed fiercely on her friend’s once more, and the whole room erupted with the veracity of fracturing, interconnected, rampant red color. I try to keep my visions to myself, thinking about what used to become of them.

Glass is an extension; it exists in a constant state of change when molten. People change every second, in a constant half-light of who they are and who they will become. Like the lake between dreaming and reality, or a painting in constant interpretation. A word without formal translation, a feeling. Making stained glass, revelations of shape-cut fragments are painted with glass powder and fired in Mariama’s homemade kiln, fusing mirages of paint to the surface. Soldering joints with lead for stability, there is something meditative of puzzling together their memories. When glassblowing, she breathes life into her art, a revitalized self of otherwise secluded rights. Unveiling colored lenses of filtered light, she distills her life, betrays time. Creating is second to nothing, as concrete as petrified lightning in sand, and the fern-shaped kisses of lightning flowers on skin of raging energy.

xxxxx

It was dead winter, dead night. No shoes, no coat. I stopped answering Mariama’s calls. Too many glass cuts and bruises, empty nights. Walking up the snow-covered sidewalk to the chapel, Khadisah felt like she was buried in the new seamless blankets of fallen snow, fallen angels. Sometimes she forgot who she was. Because she cannot save everyone. A wandering ghost, an oracle without omens. Streetlight glowed through polychromatic windows, complex renderings of tall white figures preaching of salvation. Vivid crowns of gold, marbled robes, and flecked wings outstretching and draped by flickering light on the walls. It all reflected on her skin, histories of stories in light. Candles softened the hallway with the smell of incense and old books. Khadisah sighed and exited, reentered the snowy dreamscape outside, and looked up at the universe. The absence of light was beautiful, empty, and full at the same time. The window from a miniscule existence, what oddly calms and keeps us up at night. It was quiet, no wind, no moon. She laid down, a kite without a string. She started making snow angles and let herself cry about them. All of them. The pain when her husband visited, her daughter’s inevitable path like hers. The imprint of her body congealed to glass by the time the sun rose again, and she spoke colors to the stars. The seasons changed; the stars realigned. And more snow fell into her ghost.

“so, who’s gonna take you home, huh?”

I wake underneath Japanese maple, red leaves outlined in dark umber flaming against the clear blue sky. After a deep breath and regaining my surroundings, I evaluate where I am. The underdeveloped path from the reservation meanders back to site. I don’t remember what time or day it is, but I stand and jump across a trickling iron-red stream, I land on the other side a bit older, a bit wiser. Outlined in sweet grass and sage, I gather the herbs. Mint, sumac, elderberry, and yarrow. Sunlight guides me, and I thank the earth. Wah-doh, I say to the four Winds. Peace.
The mint leaves burn, and their ashes float towards heaven.
-----

Like tuning into the radio station from deep in the forest, she heard fuzzy, fragmented sounds. She felt light against her closed eyelids, but only saw a shoreline. She knew it was a dream. The trees aren’t right – the leaves were replaced by flowers, lending their neon petals to the dense sunset air. Standing in tall sweet grass, but there’s no gravity. She looked up, and saw the Japanese maple, the embers of leaves. And saw a reflection laying in the sun looking down—or up?—at herself. She wanted to fight the setting sun, become pristine like them. But she couldn’t hold her breath under the waters for too long. Spilling from the vase of an inviolate soul, sewing the stars like her scars. When the day is burned, we vanish in moonlight.

_

Working in the hospital, the color red. Panic attacks disassociate Khadisah from reality. She can still see, but can’t move, and only watches the violence as she crumbles under the skin. There were more angel marks, more places, less friendly. Stitches from infancy to womanhood, pedophilic ****** rights. A mother at 13, she cried for days and... feels the words rush back like water flooding all around her, rising around her body. This isn’t flying, this is drowning. So this is permanence, imprisonment from identity. A body collaged up and down, cut and fragmented on city and rural streets like vines salvaging mutilated walls and shattered windows. Being so stuck she was free. She saw a lost childhood in Mariama’s glass, and she was light as a feather in her father’s arms again.

The men say the seizures are from the Diable, but it was worse than that.

Even glaciers sculpt land and cut mountains over time with oceans of frozen glass. But earth was flooding once again.

And there was no blood on her hands.