summer

Some days my mind thinks I’m still 34 on a fresh start from a sixteen year marriage newly ended. My body reminds me, that was nineteen years and over 3 degrees ago. When I…wanted, when I was…proving myself to that girl still digging out of a concrete foundation of low self-worth that was mother’s gaslighting. Now, my heart longs for those summers in the yard where I escaped to the sleepy drone of the cicada and the sun quickened my heart to an empathetic thrum in the heat.

love is a doing word

Down to the wire, I’m sore and exhausted, overwhelmed with the giving, selling, gifting, donating, and trashing, the parting with things I sometimes struggled to purchase in the first place, financially or emotionally. I am not in my bed familiar where the time between lovers grew until they were recollections. I am not in my house haunted with wonderings of the years and hours of those who lingered, meandered day and night before me. I feel I am…”not” for I am in a place void of history and seeped in transient comings and goings, one foot in, one foot out. Mostly, I no longer hear the pattering of feet, the scratching of nails on wood and tile. That was the thing that meant life was good. That is the thing I need to get back to. 

Massive Attack ~ “Teardrop”

there she goes, there she goes again

pulling pictures 

out of frames I struggle 

to recall the names of

faces from past lives; I question,

is it the third? the fourth?

the fifth life? I approach, surely, 

but who were theses people?

who was I? as I pack the frames 

for gifting, donation, disposal,

I pack the photos for archival, 

much like I pack the girl, ever-tinged

in a sorrow of worth on the horizon 

pulling pictures 

out of frames, I choose 

to love the broken thing I am

from my window

in my hood I seen

coyotes in the street 

a strolling, the smaller 

one a limping.chatting 

close, speaking soft:

a man, proper in boots, jeans, 

white shirt, hat  

on a horse at a light:

ducks in the rain

that left the yard a pond :

an old horse clomping 

leading a boy on a longboard:

eagles, hawks, owls

parakeets wild; jays 

harassing cardinals timid 

and squirrels brazen: 

neighbors driving lawnmowers 

In the street 

seishi

what will the day be,

bring; there’s a plan,

a to-do list unwritten, 

spatially conceived, 

sketched and plotted

echoes the stillness 

calling…later.

leaving on a jet plane…

sitting in chaos amidst

     the Things I thought I 

needed, loved, cared

for with attention and

upkeep: time and money 

     spent to exhaustion 

body spent to ruin, mind

butterflied and pinned 

     behind glass on the wall

There are little red pin-dots circling my ankles

when did they arrive and why?