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Shimmering I and Ghostly Hand, Cecilia Reeve, 2023.

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I think about the rose oil and the woman in the grocery store aisle who scared me with her adorance for it. I run my fingers from cheek bone to cheek bone, layering the scent of rose water into skin. I am now greater than myself, I shine for the sun. And she, for I.

I think about my adorance for rose oil, now. The distance between sweat and lotion. Im sad today. It’s very sunny and very warm, and I am loved and I love, but I am sad.

I drop the rose oil. I wonder why something so precious will be contained in something so fragile. Glass coats the ground. Drags itself from title to tile, like rose oil to cheek bone. Mind your feet. Put on your socks.

I vacuum and now it smells of you. I, of course, am on my hands and knees for this.

In the days to come which may carry your absence, I wonder: will I break glass just to feel close to him? Will I make a mess just to clean it up, just to find him? Will I sacrifice all things shiny and close to my heart?

This is how I live. One foot always in foreseeable torture. I will predict a pain before it has a chance to birth itself. This is not to say I am afraid, just a vessel.

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Your hand attached to my hip, which is to say my heart. Your hand, digging centuries into my hip, which is to say, digging red into the flesh of my heart. Carve me out an entire garden. Plant a peach, pink, and watch it grow,green. This, is our legacy: my arms, growing constant, layer over layer. Steady, like the moon rising last night. Your eyes can’t even catch it in its own act. I am the sky and also the earth. I mean I’m digging centuries into each. I mean I belong to nothing, not even the earth. The moon belongs to no one, not even the sky. Not even the night.

I am rooted, have always been rooted, deeper to the ground then logic. My mind, so heavily reliant on my heart. Intuition, birthed someplace in between (but makes a home in my stomach)

Josephines father dies and she comes home a mourning masterpiece. All tired eyes and the color black. Still the blonde, blonde hair. Still that gracious, grand presence. Just coated in a thin layer of cigarette smell and carrying around the proper cough for that.

Baby fucks me into February, declares this a month of loving. We will hold (hands, hips, breath) until one of us turns Blue. My cold palms, fingers, will not turn him away. Just draw his warmth closer. Heart meets heart, aching affection birthed somewhere in between. Baby feeds me chocolate and I wake up high, laugh myself into another month. Baby is my home, and so, I let myself live inside this high. I want it everyday. I remember what it’s like to be 16 and clawing at every present moment, begging it to last in a memory. Baby makes me laugh. That’s all. Just me and him and chocolate and a lotta leftover love.

Baby and I spent our together-life buying pizza split down the middle and sharing both sides. Forgetting the cornbread coupons. Cutting up the vegetables and making up the seasonings. Tucking each other into bed. Falling asleep on the couch. Watching the other pee. Pushing each other out of the way of the sink, so we can drink some tap water. In the car, paused for many moments in time, looking up at the dark sky, listening to the albums, from start to end. Drinking each other’s water. Filling each other’s water. Pausing for kisses. Planting back kisses. Opening the bedroom window. Closing the bedroom window. Big spoon. Little spoon. Switching between the two. Hiding behind walls to scare the other. Adding movies to the list. Talking. Just talking.

Baby digs inside of me just to come up for air covered in the misfortunes of a body that just could never get the balance right. Like so many times before, I fall into my body’s own betrayal. Still, she is all I have. Baby says he’ll be right back, washes himself clean of my burden. Baby sees me cry and for the first time, does not call me sensitive. Does not ask me to just roll it away. Instead, climbs into our bed. Slides heart right against back of heart. Whispers ease into the air. It’s okay, it’s okay. We’re clean now. Nothing too big. No reason to cry. Settle, baby. Be easy. Comes right back inside. The way home. A entire month of raw love. A meat so tender it melts.

Baby dreams about me, and finally, I about him.

Mateo is a boy so sweet I get cavities just speaking his language. A tongue full of sugar. Momma needs help with her language and Mateo, 4 and ever loving, will be her translator for the rest of their lives. This will be a bond unbreakanle, rooted from H.E.R. earth right to his.

Meteo asks me to make him an airplane. Momma says they are his favorite. So simple, paper folded over itself. Don’t gotta fly too far. Mateo doesn’t mind mistakes, smiles graciously at whatever I place in his palm.

I make Mateo an airplane out of brown construction paper.

Like all things gracious, giving, and constructed out of love, it does fly. It will fly.

Bsby, too, will construct himself a plane. Climb right inside. Baby will land where all the peaches come to grow. He will stumble over peach pits every day, and then every month, and then once every few years. And when he does, he will remember a heart once rooted in soft, Shea butter skin. And with that, his own heart, once tangled in dark, knoted hair.

And with that, the abundance of love, birthed somewhere in between. Rooted permanently with those trees

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by Bye.Bye.Birdie

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There is a morning and it is large and it holds all the tired things your hands couldn’t. At night, my eyes are anchored shut by the tired things. My eye lashes pointing to my toes. Yes, the morning comes for this weight. Lifts my eyes open. Says, leave the rest behind in your dreams.

Kybryah is all long eye lashes and hips. She hides no emotion. She is the open morning, all tired things showing right up on her face. When she needs, she needs like nothing else exists and when she loves, she loves like a child should. Kybryah is 2, all wide eyed - shut eyed- can’t really look you in the eye unless she’s determined, almost 3 year old. I also am an almost something. Almost all teacher almost kind almost forgiving but I just can’t touch my toes to it yet. Kybryah will get her way anywhere, she’ll just push you out of the way to do it. I’ll get my way there, to the places I’m almost at. I just need to push my way there.

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An amateur orchid grower works in the window of his greenhouse in Silver Spring, Maryland, April 1971.Photograph by Gordon Gahan, National Geographic

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(October, 2018) (?)

You left, and you took the girl I used to be with you. Her very blue hair and appetite for soft and hopeful things. My intuition is still just as big, I just don’t really sit down for dinner with it anymore. Like so many other parts of me, I leave it to collect dust in my trunk. Try to stop it from falling out in the parking lot of the preschool when I open it to find a new pair of shoes. It goes like this: there was love and it was large and I let it swallow me whole.

There was love and it was large and I was lucky to leave.

Tell me of your dreams, the elephants you fold up inside of them. My lips will always be stained with the lies you kissed on to them. In the middle of the night, in the morning before you left for work. Yes, my lips will always be tainted a little bit red, despite my adorance for the way they look pale.

I dream of you every night. I fall asleep in a bed and wake up inside an ocean. I am salt in the water, I mean you are the salt, I mean we are both the salt and the bedroom is the water. You are the salt and I am the water and everyone else is swimming inside us. I mean I was a girl swimming and you were the ocean and you swallowed me whole.

Have I let you turn me into someone else. Am I reflection of you, the way you could not love me? Did you teach me how to un love myself? These are the questions that burrow themselves into my body. I pick them out of my teeth after every meal. Why couldn’t you love me? Did you watch me try to make you love me? For how many years more would you continue? (To watch). Did you see me play tug of war with each of our hearts? Did it make you happy, did I make you happy? Where does the rope begin and where does it end.

Your enlarged heart and my fast one. When you hold me, I can feel yours like a sunset. When I hold you, when I’m nervous about the girls you’ve been touching while I’m across the city, do you feel mine like a sunrise? This will be the game we play until the end of time. Until I end our time. I like your hands, the way they bandage up my razor cuts and tuck my hair behind my ear and tuck me into bed, but I like my own too. I’d like to see them clean again. It’s been so long. My god, my unforgiving god, it’s been so long.

I like your hands, long and searching for my hips when you know you’ve done something wrong. When you know I’m gonna say it’s the last time. I like your hands, cooking for me when it’s late and pushing me down to your own hips. I like your hands, but I got tired of writing about them. It was easier to let the moments pass. It was less painful to not record it all. It makes the mourning easier. The morning is always easier when I leave first. When I don’t drive you to work. When I don’t have to watch you get dressed. When I don’t have to be the one being left.

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(November, 2018)

My love for you is a cut from a razor, set in the center of my shin. You lay my leg across your lap and play paramedic. We play house and we play tug of war with each others hearts. Your ex played the piano and you loved her very much. This is, of course, is the way it had to be written. Piano is the only instrument that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to cry. Have you ever learned a stranger’s life just by watching their back move in pace with their hands?

This is almost the way I learned to love you. All back and raw emotion. All turned around and overwhelmed passion.

You bandage broken parts of me. Always picking up my messes. Wiping the blood that drips down my limbs.

You pick out theee bandaids. Wipe alcohol across the scrapes. Kiss me when I say it doesn’t hurt. Kiss me when I say it does. You move slowly. Like the sex. Like with all things tender that need tending to. I myself am a mess. I lay myself across your back every morning when we wake up together, just so you don’t forget the weight of this. I don’t want it to drown you like it does me, just enough pressure to keep you calm and grounded.

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“if there is a light then i am going to swallow it. if there is a god then i’m going to make him cry.”

— s. osborn, from “blasphemies at the 5th street station,” published in The Rising Phoenix Review (via lifeinpoetry)

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“This is not to say all men are hungry. This is not even to say all men are hunting. But haven’t we all found the bones of a woman stuck like leftovers between a full man’s teeth?”

— Blythe Baird, from If My Body Could Speak 

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Look at how every breath I take is an act of defiance. Look at that. Look at that. Look at that. Look at that. Just look at that.

— Topaz Winters, from “story,” poems for the sound of the sky before thunder

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“Scratch my heart to find / The roots of last year’s roses in my breast;”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, from The Collected Poems; “Sonnets,”

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