Time Signatures
She was spun from a sonata,
born tap dancing across ledger lines
and spiting key signatures like
cherry pits. Treble and base;
one hand spidering up, up, up,
along the ivory of the hospital bed,
the other only a pitter patter
along her mother’s palm.
Her father pays for lessons
in brush strokes; coating
the teacher’s house with red.
His brush moves in time
with his daughter’s Breval;
dripping half notes down the siding,
splashing angry quarters
along each window sill,
and
The pigment, red like the poppies
growing outside her window,
is worn into his
callouses for weeks,
matching the dress she wears on Sundays
to her lessons after church. He picks her up,
swings her like a rag doll, singing and proclaiming
her to be better than Mozart,
finer than Shirley Temple.
Life Sciences
She enters the class room
and the rustling stops.
Boys clinging to childhood,
Letterman jackets and class rings,
Stare like the men they are
Here to become.
She’s one of two girls;
All hips and hair
And painted nails.
Their eyes roam
as she takes her seat
behind the black slate table.
Her curls, caught up gracefully
In a practical collegial twist,
Are the color of her father’s coffee;
Two sugars, one cream.
Chills
She had never liked ice cream.
The coolness of it against her teeth,
The way it froze, first her mind, then her body.
From the inside out.
But she sculpted it perfectly.
All that summer, filling the sticky
Hands of children with chocolate fudge swirl
In exchange for mumbled compliments
And sidelong glances.
A widower they
would murmur
over the boiling fudge,
swatting away the pink hands
of six motherless children.
They where like ice cream,
Sweet and cool and temporary.
They would grow, up and out
As their kind always did,
Which would leave her Ben,
His shy smile and odd ways.
But first there was school
So she could pay the bills
With more than milk bottles
And spun sugar
Chemical Illness
She’s spent too much time in hospitals,
straightening grey starched sheets
around withered bodies, holding
leathery hands, sleeping
in hard plastic chairs, skin itching
with sickness and antiseptic.
She’d seen too many bodies, laid out
in suits or in dresses or in urns,
smelling of roses and formaldehyde.
Too many bodies to call them cadavers,
to easily slice and stitch them-
the once loved- on cold metal,
surrounded by the watchful eyes
of everyone but God.
Manic
1.
Manic; the word cool against her teeth
like ice cream, freezing her tongue
to the roof of her mouth, like licking
a cold pipe in winter.
She had never imagined his fits
to be more than rages; storms
to be weathered. His sadness
wasn’t depression, it was his nature,
the quiet that had drawn her to him
that had fostered her love like
the baby bird Michael brought home
in a shoe box.
2.
A widower she whispers to herself,
helping another woman’s children pack
their entire lives into rucksacks
and carpet bags. One last visit
to the hospital, walking past ghosts
of patients and reapers of doctors,
to see their father one last time.
He loves the girls, tells them to be good;
shouts at his sons, do they know
what happens in the army?
He’s still shouting as they leave,
how could they leave him,
their father, here of all places?
3.
Make him better mama.
Michael’s carrying a bird,
lying on it’s side in defeat,
it’s wing bent out of shape.
Found on the long walk home
from a new school, the bird
is one of a million
little things that would
make him cry.
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