In winter, we stepped onto crunchy snow in hand-me-down boots, and listened to the silent wind and counted our blessings.

sometimes i get an idea in my head, and i gotta write it down real fast before it goes away forever so
I’m sorry i snuck away from dinner and plodded up the stairs but my
head was drumming too fast heart pounding too fast and
here it is, unpolished, but existent, somehow and that’s a miracle in and of itself  

I  am eating dinner with my family, minus my sister plus five guests, all with different backstories (but they’re not important now). I am eating dinner with ten strangers who I ought to know better. The first woman talks, the one in the sundress, with tanned shoulders.

and i’m mad at her for being in a bad marriage where she is hurt time and time again, and won’t realize, for being intolerable and intolerant (she doesn’t like people like me), and for her black curls which are beginning to gray because
I look to her daughter, who shares her eyes and silently wonder what her fate will become.

Later, later, they talk of politics, of my father’s late mother, of Christian truck drivers, of moments I wasn’t present for, and I sit, and swallow my hamburger meat and barbecue sauce and giggle every once in awhile so they know I’m still alive. Somebody starts talking about alternative education, and my grandfather listens attentively while sipping Blue Moon out of a can and the woman with gray fluffy hair whom I love so and for whom I’m named joins the conversation. I don’t remember what she says. I do know

in another life, she was trapped in a marriage with a loveless *******. She escaped and left him; he dated his therapist after and they might’ve gotten married; I’m not sure since we stopped getting updates on him awhile ago). I never loved him, and neither did my sisters so it didn’t matter.

What mattered though, and what still does matter is that she was so observant. I think that’s how she tells people she loves them; she whispers little details she sees to them, and is so genuine about it.

Once, a woman said that truck drivers thing told me I only acted nice when I wanted things, and since then we’ve been drifting apart, and it’s like there’s been blue clouds of ice forming between us, the kind you see in Finland in the winter. She was warm to me today, in a plasticy way, and I tried to be pleasant. I think I was too blunt, though. I wish I could mean it, when I was sociable and lovely, but it’s all an act.

I scrape my fork against my porcelain plate, and swallow once again. The tomatoes sting on my lips; they are too acidic, and the mozarella has been stained by the red, shriveled because it absorbed the juice and
suddenly this is the most terrible salad, and the most terrible night and I suddenly feel so green with rage that I run to my room.

And I inevitably return to the table, and the people, and the lights, and I avoid their eyes, but by now the children have wandered and one is arranging lemon squares on a platter in the kitchen for dessert. Thank god.

I start talking in the bright kitchen, much too fast, and then I chide myself and try to look at everyone else. A child sits, perched on the counter. “Can you do this?,”  she inquires, and clucks her tongue and smiles, her sunburned nose ever visible in the light. Her eyes are green and too big for her face and my heart hurts because she is truly lovely, and she means it.

little boy in his red sweater sits on the couch,
waiting for the day to begin

1919, peanuts and pine, and the tangy smell of cologne and sweat mixed together

Ocean water lapping at my toes, bringing me back to cleaner days, reminding me of her.  

The train to Roosevelt Island, of black rail, steam and fog, lurching there and back again.

Sparkler candles from my sixteenth birthday. A miscellaneous collection of bottle caps, all donated from friends. A book of pictures.

Cable cars. Hot spicy soup. Three quests for a sunset, three kings for a prince. Addendums, beginnings, and wandering the hospital hallways. The boy with the arab strap.

That my aunt persevered, and taught herself to smile.  
That the sun rises after every dark night.
That beyond the horizon lays more land, more sea, and more wonder.
That you can start again and again, and no one can tell you when to stop.

The sky right after a thunderstorm, when it's still a furious dark gray, and yet sunshine creeps through its cracks of the clouds (which I always hated, but learned to love).

The soft morning glories in my hands, showered in sunlight and love. That Nature could be so tender, delicate, and pure. That yellow was no longer my least favorite color.  

The way wind brushes my bedroom windows, and the willow trees call to me, mournfully shaking their leaves.

4am, lamplight, softer than the rain. Dried flowers. Guitar music wafting down the streets of Boston.

How the only one that could forget me was me.
How I could be alone.
How I could love every small thing.

I: Down the mississippi I will go, past blushing steamboats and river banks and green mud, past algae pools, with turtles bobbing at the surface. I will march forth past crop circles, golden fields and everything worn down in Nebraska even the abandoned parks, nuclear mind fields, wastelands of pollution and industry (and don’t worry, there’s beauty too) like so many leaves I never knew there were so many oak trees that grew despite the steaming summer haze and the chomping ivy vines. I never knew the Southern forests were as thick as the Amazon.

Actias luna resides in the moss, an elated fairy, resting on hickory tree branches long enough to continue it’s periless flight.
I will carry myself, I will push through forest, prairie, city and not look back because
I won’t become a ghost in a foreign land. I won’t be there long enough to be remembered, or immortalized. I will not leave my metal plates or my stove behind because they can’t fit in a wagon I am
walking alone, not barefoot but I may as well be. I want to be in contact with the land, and I imagine

in this new land, we make do with what we have, and we are happy enough for the time being. we are comfortable in the waiting time.

A love poem is this ode, an explanation perhaps (to my mother) why I do not talk enough, why I stare out the dark windows as we peck at salmon, why all my words come out at once and too fast for my own tongue.

I have been imagining the open landscapes for a long time now, I have been picturing the Californian sky at night, I have been dreaming of Spanish moss and grape vines, I have been contemplating how blue, pink, and white clouds can exist in the same sky (maybe we can, too).

In this journey, this amalgamation of past and future, (as always), I’m brought back to the tide. Repetition, frothy salty cold repetition. Something not controlled by me, which I am not even a part of. The tide reminds me that we are not creatures of Earth; we are Earth’s creatures.

When I cross the border between land and sea, I will be free. I am a wanderer at heart, and will never stop moving or changing. This is the only promise I can give you, and you must cup it in your hands and keep it close to your heart, save it for a rainy day. We will all find our homes, one day.