All of the Things I Don't

For a few courageous seconds
I was the color of the moon
wide as my momma’s smile
bright &
not a mistake.
My mouth full with a good secret.

Do you remember what it’s like
to be born into an ocean?
to lick salt
from fat tomato slices?
to bite the inside of your cheek
in the same spot, a hundred times
thick and cumbersome,
sharp, sour?

I was a small
ambitious mountain.
I was a storm cloud passing through.
I was glowing and chalk dust
& nobody’s apology. I was
a dust mite. A dandelion
carefully the shape of the moon.

Now, it is getting late.
Now it’s time to go home.

Let me tell you how I die: 

//on a very well-lit bridge. I am sorry.
I am not sorry. I am not watching this play
out any longer I am pulling
my body to the cold water I am
taking a deep breath.

//in my sleep
but not peacefully. I am dreaming
of the time you broke my arm
at the grocery store
and promised me a gift and
gave me a piece of yourself
I didn’t ever ask for.

//on a concrete floor in a locked room
and not where the paperwork put me
& black & blue & black & white
and not how the paperwork put me
and on my feet in the dark
and not where the testimony put me.

//with a snake around
my thighs, telling me
I am home.
Too smart for my own good,
my mouth too big.

//on my back
clinging to something
that will not move for
me. Go ahead and tell me
my body is a temple –
there is no safety here.

//naked in an alley
with mud on my insides.
Am I being heavy-handed?
I was light touch and
whisper fingers
for millennia
you will have to excuse
my frantic clawing
now.

//in my own bed on new sheets
in a room I was a baby in
once, before a sideways look,
before you asked me
to dance. Before you told me
your own name meant music and plague. 

//with broken ribs
whistle through hollow bones,
a quieted song.

1.
Some mornings, your whisper is so low
I have to stand still to hear you, and even then
the birch trees slur your words. When I can’t listen
over photosynthesis chatter, I imagine you are telling me
you’re proud. You have always been so proud, and now
you’re coming home.

2.
I know you’re not the one who built
the birdsong but I know you think
you built it all. You built me
from the ground up. But now
I’m curled and hunched and
folding away from the sun.

3.
You told me to love you most so I loved you
so big my heart valves made music.
But they only played the harmony, and it didn’t
make sense without its brother and it wasn’t
beautiful and I thought, how could
my big love sound so much
like a landslide?

4.
I am a heart in a body.
A heart in a body and
words in my mouth
and a face made of scars.
I am frozen earth.
I am trying to be soft.
I am not soft.
I have worm hands.
I have skin like glass.
I am dressed like a kindness;
I am not kind.

5.
My brother’s keeping
me from you. Today,
I used my thumb and index finger
to crush the bones of a robin
and scoop out its song. I made you
a collage of feathers and music
and it is not beautiful.

i didn’t tell you about the crash
because i am still waiting for
it to unhappen.

tell me love is my kneecaps, sink
teeth into soft joint. tell me
history is imaginary tell me curvy stories
of small heroes. tell me death is the way
my skin smells in the snow.
close your eyes i am only
sinking if you watch me sink.

i stepped on all the cracks. i am
still holding my breath, waiting for
what comes after.

These hands are not more like
the captain of a sinking ship in calm
the confidence in nothing and nothing and salt water

these hands are congratulations shake
shiver valedictorian cold
though gloved warm firewood
splinters finger prick little blood little salt little broke long nails
don’t dig nails don’t chew skin or inside cheek
do’t flag down bus with hands don’t beg with hands
don’t shield or cower don’t fight with hands
don’t dig don’t bury don’t

these hands are not more like yours than they like
his they clean knuckles
they unscraped unfight unbroken
and white
and stopsign strong and steel strong and wide awake hands
and white and unbroken uncracked unholding do undo undoing done do undone

Big shoes to fill
and graceless steps.
You were a child and she was not
the sunshine in your breakfast cereal.
But you were born with a mouth full of
black ink wrapped in silver swirled around
your fingers darling she loved you
the only way she knew how,
that fool’s excuse.

She wrote you letters 
before you knew the alphabet she wrote
you letters, she wrote you off.
She was always sorry, always
a fireball. She wrote your memories,
your bedtime stories, she wrote your too
small feet. She wrote herself, a trespass
we could not abide.

She left those shoes in the kitchen,
how could you not
step inside?

name me snake
but look close: my hands
have lifted your sons for eons.
i picked them, every time love
broke my spare parts spine to tend
your garden.
you think it a sin i lost my way.

there was no will, no forked
tongue, no crisp remorse.
name me spite, you made me
second, you made me
silent, you made
a fearsome enemy.

i knew long before
the sweet juice on my chin:
your love was not ours
to have. you would have let
him stomp me to ash, i knew
even then.

call me a gift
but i will not be given
or taken, discarded
bruised, or cored.
my breasts of worms
will not be dressed in
leaves or left behind.
my insides belong to
my daughters.
you are not welcome here.

in between us
with IOUs and high interest bank loans,
believing that closing the space could close the space

believing in steel and gerder
in rivet in rust in suspension.

Can you tell I’m being poignant?
In the absence, I am trying show a strength we know
I don’t have. But my shoulders
widen a little every day,
stretch to span the space.
one day I can lie
face down in the ocean
and the fingertips of my left hand
may touch the dirt you roused on your morning run and that will be
something.

in small ways by small victories,by the battlefield of Tuesday, bearing breakfast
teeth bared, barely breathing,
the cement in your lungs still soft.

In small ways, you tell
the story of your fingertips: soft touch
on holly leaves, the tiny drops of blood,
the parts of you you don’t count
when you count the parts.
The sum of what you left behind. To live is to be marked 
by your mother’s body
and your children’s feet. To eat yourself alive all the time, every second
a tooth mark, the way you recall your skin in the dark.

To live is to be scraped in big ways
by big love like Cain’s love
by seared flesh, by twisted arms
and ringing ears and pen marks and straight lines

to live like a finger prick,
like a cat-scratch screaming match,
like a hangnail apology.

I am made of cement but I am not
yet dry. There are handprints and names
in my face, in my thighs.
There is strength in that which is
scarred, my body a prologue in Braille. 

 (Title from Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible)

I like to imagine
a long, scrolling will,
a grand apology, a currency admission
of guilt and loneliness and shame

but I know there will be none
of that, and I will stand up
and not laugh, and not accuse
or elicit gasps or applause or embarrassment.
Instead, I’ll tell the story
of the two shot guns sharing the closet
during hide and seek,
the way you told us they were toys
the way we nearly died from the excitement
the small lies and small hands you
didn’t think through in the bedroom closet
between the Christmas presents and the old shoes.