Daddy takes me to the greenhouse,
behind our rotted trailer, deep in sovereign backwoods.
Marsh voices, thick like tupelo honey.

The coo of a loon, hiss of a cottonmouth, shiver of a snapping turtle.

The silver of swamp lilies lip the land in wild haze,
a veil of ochre moss tickles my nose like gauzey ginger ale
and soil clings to my ankles like a lonesome hound.

Daddy’s greenhouse is a shed, a haven.
A milieu of magic and fleur-de-cannabis
where pixies pull my curls and gnomes dance
under mushroom parasols.

My hands dip into a hollow of muddy earthworms.
I feel akin to the yellow blood of a butterfly
or pale jade of perplexing geckos.  

Daddy is a shaman.

He trims holy blooms that come from spirits
who sing in the wind like the whippoorwill at dusk.
Snipping sticky bushels, he pads tufts into his pipe,
carved in the shape of a sullen armadillo.

I watch him inhale.

                          His breath
                                               stiff
                            as a braid of mangroves.

                      He exhales a ligneous cough.

                              I don’t mind,
                                                   much.

Nobody put any one of themselves first,
just the bottle.
My mother, genteel as she was,
wrote sketchpad poems on how alcohol must feel
shrouded in a chifforobe. If I were the author
each stanza would only say “warm”
because such is how I felt
folding myself among the goblets as a child.

On dress hangers she had no use for
but to dream to abort me,
I hung and thought about how laconic my kin was
not asking what state I was in the past week.

(Mississippi,
I would announce. M-I-S-S   I-S-S   I-P-P-I
as many meters as letters in its name
and I burnt my calf on an old man’s motorcycle:
he kissed it better, a stranger did
though your bureau’s dirt chocked below my nails.
)

A false god set my parakeet free that trip
at least that is what mother held when I got back –
Oh, many days ago, azure feathers
spanned in a conduit
right by the lady’s home, you know the one
you tell me that her carpets look like bacon strips
(once eleven years ago I had,
as many years as in Mississippi’s name).

Had it been so many months
from the episode when I accidentally mumbled
“I hate you” and never regretted it as I should have?
Had it been so many hours since I wondered
why I could not hate her
but she could hate me, or say so “accidentally”?

Nobody put any one of themselves first,
just the bottle
even I was careful not to shatter when we shared a
ligneous hiding space, regal, misunderstood.

But on returning from Mississippi,
(M-I-S-S   I-S-S   I-P-P-I
One Mississippi Two Mississippi Three Mississippi Four)
I hoisted myself like a stiff jacket and
realized no one could see the difference between
red wine and a child's blood, in laced imperial stripes.

Meet me down by the old creek bed
The scary rotting ligneous bridge
Rusted metal and wood warping
Dropping a man into the muddy bottom

A clothespin and a playing card
A cereal box robot reflector
Dusty road that’s gravel sharp
Bled my knees and bent my bicycle wheel

I swung on the old vine tree
Playing out my Neverland fantasies
One lost boy no fairies in sight
No mermaid kisses or decent Pirate fights

White wooden saw horse
Played Battlecat to my He-man
A cracked wooden board on
A frayed twisting rope

Peppered grey house with old trimming
This is where I found my beginnings
Old man dead now the woman’s gone to
Pretty soon I’ll forget all I knew

Two miles down there’s a dead man’s farm
Row after row of white tombstone
Faded glittering grey monuments
That is where I will meet my end

It was a fictionary universe
So dull I consider as curse
Non-aesthetic beauty it burst
Ligneous plants dying by the thirst

But 1914 happened
Where darkness was awakened
The people became a burden
Thy trust in this world was loosened

The fiction thought became a reality
Where money's slowly eating the society
Whom they thought gold as a deity
And power as the Holy Trinity

Before Sun assents into the ether,
I stand with bare feet on a ligneous deck,
A vastness of green,
So that I can watch Mist rise above the hill tops
to greet me with a brisk embrace.  

Reddening the palms of my hands,
A warm clay cup, brimming with bitter, rich liquid,
Emits silky Steam which dances with Mist,
Floating up towards Moon, now fading into blue.  

And while Steam and Mist entangle their tails
I sit, watching them play as I breath in musky Smoke,
Absconding from a glass pipe.

Smoke blows away, much like sultry clouds,
And foils the waltz construed by warmth and cold.
Every sway and bend,
Coil and twist,
Delicately sweeping through the air;

Mist, Steam, and Smoke dance together
Becoming the sky and the air I breathe
Until the Sun arises, and it is time to go inside.

The sun greets me in pieces, through the evergreens’ needles and limbs,
Tickling bits of dust particles,
And air-born, fluttery spores,
Soothing my goosebumps.
But the wooded labyrinth has a magnetizing aroma,
One of eerie descent
That I can’t let go of,
Even with the subdued lullaby of warm, midday light.
I crave the unnerving mystery
That the tall, stoic, ligneous soldiers give without hesitation.
I want to be caught with my heart in my throat,
And my breath unattainable.
I want their twigs and wiggly things
Wriggling in my core,
And hear my heartbeat thumping: “more!”
And befall my breathy song;
My wail
That never ends
Until I find the forest center.
Where most are lost,
I’m found.