Something you can hold
Touch to make it feel real
Like it actually had been there
At least somewhere in time

A wedding band slipped on my mother's finger
After he proposed with a bread tie

More than two decades ago
That's how long I've planted myself here
And I wasn't always around in their short story

Happy-sad-sided short story it was,
But when holding the circle up to the sunlight
A bright fable
Beams through
An old story
A fantasy I call childhood

In the middle of that ring

The strands of light stretch around one bend in its
dampened golden body
and across to another
Like a spider web tangled in between the sheen of once forever
It's a little big on my finger

It's my mothers, just a little bigger than me, but it holds a different story to her
One she doesn't seem to think about
Not like the way I think about mine

I remember my father's gold
Roped into his dark hands
Stained by sun
His working hands
Hardened by oil fields and car engines
The giant callous he called a palm

The roughest surface spread love into my skin
Rubbing it into my back, or gently accross my small sticky hands, like butter
Like I was his southern sweat bread
They were so different
There castle would have fallen anyway
My mothers kitchen reads "Yankee"