The static of an April around the corner,

if I never visit again,
I will still hold the bottle in two hands
as it is tugged by an orphan calf we called Annie.
My legs will finally be pulled clean through
the holes in the cast iron chairs --
we aren't the kind to buy cushions for porch furniture,
we are the type to leave grandma's salt and pepper shaker collection
in a corner in the garage wall until a grandson comes by,
only then to pretend it is precious and snatch it from his hands
and try to peel off 50 cent and 25 cent stickers
from a garage sale twenty years ago.
you say you will grow a garden. I have only seen it once.
You say this is an apple tree, but the apples have already been eaten.

I cannot place him on the swing that was cut down from the triple tree
outside the breakfast room window,
but I can walk him down the slide
someone gone once used to shoot firewood down into the basement
where someone else once turned on Achy Breaky Heart
and jumped on an unclaimed bed under a net of balloons

even though it was a quarter my house, I just wondered
when will the balloons drop, and will I be there for it?

When the will unfolds in an office somewhere,
the bottle and the swing,
the garage and the balloons and the garden,
all of grandpa and grandma and the cousins
will be lorded above my head one last time
on the way to the neighbor girls.

Maybe she will let me keep a pair of shakers
but only if they are wooden, not the kind that could break.

Goodbye, Saturn, Goodbye

each Spring
in my rotation around the Sun
I pass by the arched branches
and stand at the threshold for only a moment

I know what lies in the shaded tunnel
I know what the whispering leaves belie

my heart burns hot in trajectory to Saturn
and I cannot stop turning pages back and forth
as if memorizing the few moments we share
as if I have not already worn them smooth

turbulence knocks loose old worries from their nooks
and each year I check for an emergency brake
but the sky is so clear up here, my hand falls on damp damp high clouds
fingers coated in water that is nearly ice
but for my body heat.

God, every Spring as the ring of rock and ice comes into view,
that is the moment I break atmosphere
and am frozen

We made no adjustments
We did not even check the gear
Of course it was my destiny to fall back to Earth

June melts the oils under my eyelids
as dusk catlounges in the air like your moon face over mine,
temples pushed by fingers and by elbows.
Did your dad wash your hair in the big white sink, too?
Did your dad trace lines atop defiance?
When was the last time
I heard a cicada call? I tried to catch the very tail,
but the next day heard another and forgot to count again.

Mom tossed salt on my watermelon slices
and next I asked for box mix brownies,
lying on my stomach in front of the TV
a whole summer weekend ahead of me.
Mom's part time doves in a cage down the hall
The snake who escaped last summer in Chaska grass.
Rubbing back and forth on deep pile carpet
until mom told me to go do it in my room.

The smell of shake n bake almost ready in the oven.
The rest of the movie heard but unseen.

Hallucinations from childhood become myth
and half shape me into legend:
the girl who screamed in a fever
to take the glowing star stickers down
and made Dad's eyes spread wide --

how she had begged for them weeks before.

The girl who willed a ghost from the pages of a book,
popped straight out to kiss her --

or was it a dream, spit sticky in the crook of her arm?

The girl who fell asleep on the floor of the open garage,
and realized waking up alone,
she was the only one who knew
how tiring it was --

she had to walk through the back door
for the kitchen to come alive, for eyes to fall open.

There is a version of the room where we are flipping through pictures on a phone,
or was it a page of Kafka's diary,
but nevermind the point is we are quiet 
and only the box fan in the corner murmurs,
"remember the night?"

We circle titles in tandem before we nod at the choice
we pin up on the wall, him on the left me on the right.
We stand back with hands at our sides
and the box fan whispers,
"but the jasmine. the booze."

In the end, we smile weakly but do not remember
the wattage of what our true smiles once were,
and so we do not feel cold with backs turned --
shoes go by the door, pillows go on beds,
and we go opposite ways down Buena Park Blvd.

Oh, Inheritance

it is time to put the flour in
and you bloom a cloud up over our hands.
it is time to put banana in
and each knuckle holds the leftovers
when you pull your hands back out.

your papa always made banana bread, my love,
and you would have heard a laugh that shakes the lamps
if you were there with him when
it was time to put the butter in
but you held the bowl to your lips and
drank it all instead.

We were there at the right time and in the right place,
but all we took away from it were unmatched grains of sand
wrapped in foil with the edges open.
We could hear every "maybe" that slipped away.

Unfinished, to be revisited

Spoiler

He is never hiding
but is always around a corner
unclear at first about what he brings
a squint pushing lines ever deeper into
honey brown cheeks.

He sits atop an island rock
crested by waves pushed in through quiet reaches,
swayed only three times a day by boats,
the rest organically bent and shaken by the sea.
He speaks of thrift and

He sits on a Spanish doorstep
and perhaps knowns nothing of how
he is labeled "artisan" on Google Maps.
Nothing has a price tag,
though some grand constructions are named.
Here is the church
Here is the steeple
I pull open the wooden school house
and he asks if I am a teacher,
the only thing my father said he was proud of me for.

from all of us here on the good earth


before we knew, the moon was hues and blues
we fiddled with first in paper mache and crayon
forty some years ago

each mother and each father sat just offstage
and whispered, knowing the ovation would rise,
leaving messages in tight capped pill bottles and
the corners behind doors, opened just
as we set into the curve.

harps and violins described celestial rings
over waters filled with ancient lens scaled beasts.
hark now the trumpets, the chutes unfurled,
to stretch a hand into the space
just outside the classroom door --
what child has next the chance
to open their eyes and gaze upon the good earth?

We are not in that old house anymore.
We are rising and falling in a spectacle of tide.
We are inviting others to dinner.
We are laying down the knife, please, laying down the knife.

I wish he had died just for a little
so I could wrap my head around
the honor it should have been to
cut his curling toenails or even just
hold his hand in the car to the doctor's.

And when I had scream cried in front of
just twenty two gas stations (yes the same one
more than once, but twenty two screams, I mean),
he would have come back into a world
where I knew to send him cakes by delivery
for the birthdays I was not there for,
where I would have never skipped a call
and never been distracted by the commute.

He would have come back to life in time for our flight,
and hugged me tighter than ever when I walked
as I had daydreamed, through the door into his kitchen.

And maybe we would have moved back
and he would be snoring in the next room while we snore in ours.

Just dead long enough to learn how to love properly
and shed what patterns of youth kept up shy childish snubs.

What I am saying is, I am ready, Dad. You can come back now.

There was a day I sat
and felt a buzzing behind my left ear --
in some other life on some other plane,
I had been shot in the head and was bleeding out to the end.

In this life, it was the memories that slid out into the air
and wafted on dull sunbeams out screen windows to die.
Goodbye, goodbye, I don't remember with whom I am speaking,
but you must have been good at some point, goodbye.

Some wounds leave itching scars and toddler hands,
but others never fully close. Just as a tongue is lost
without repeating, I do not get to pass by
the buildings of when I was young. I do not get to refresh
memories of summer picnics at the sight of the right street sign,
or the bloom of a winter friendship at the sight of the right bus stop.
These places leak out slowly, leave a smell I cannot place in their wake,
but I don't remember quite where I was going,
and so my fingers open wide to let
everything I once knew fly like a broken bird --
maybe my sisters will remember who I was.
Maybe I will never be who I was.

I wish you said happy birthday
or asked how much he has grown,
but you are busy inside your church
and we are sunning by wide windows
pattered by lilting threads of violin without melody --
you would ask to turn him down,
but I would open the windows and let his sound fly unto the world.
Know him! He loves you all, I mean it! He does not know anything else,
yet.

He does not know a grandmother who doesn't ask after him
because he is busy holding the hands of the ones who walk in the door
to smile with him and hear him play.