I Wanted Rainbows For You

You are the sum of your dream minus the reality that you've found here.

If A is the grey day to day of an eight-person household
in a home built for five,
with a shell where a mother was,
and a television never silenced -
this is your family now,
and they're as broken as the one you came from -
you remember yourself and sisterlings biting back to cause tears,
but these pieces of matched femininity,
perfect modern military brides
have married a stoicism usually reserved for generals
as they send their best and brightest to the fire.

Then B is the grit and dust of a Manhattan skyline,
a brunette you can no longer touch.
She's a page from a vision you had,
all black coats and berets,
burning cherries and tattooed angels down under the El -
You think she said, 'take the F train' -

you blinked
and found something that was supposed to be better,
so she stands a temptation in pearls.

You draw her static between your fingers,
a faint pop of neon against the distinct black and whites of the whats
This is.

A muse is to temptation
as amuse is to laughter

You think she might be sick on sweets,
she knows you're sick of the rain.

I digress.

If A is just Asquared, but minus B,
that's only Zero,
the scariest of imaginary numbers.

Imaginary numbers are messy,
they don't suit our standard equations or engineered algorithms,
they fall into string theory which has 12 dimensions
and no common thread binding them all together but your biology -
which is love -
which is an imaginary number,
Clementine.

It's messy.
You can only try to keep yourself clean.

I See You, ICU

With the pans you baked my first birthday cake in
I bake cakes for your youngest daughter,
blanche and saute broccoli for fried rice
which was the first thing we ate together that I remember.

You furnished my apartment with things
I didn’t realise I needed -
extra-long towels, plush bathmats,
you recognized this love of luxury in me from such a young age
and it’s been a half-joke ever since -
your last gift to me:
black velvet persian slippers.

You furnished my apartment,
which should have been your eldest’s
posessions cared for sloppily and passed to your youngest.
I am not niece or cousin
or even daughter,
a God we used to believe in 25 years ago called us together -
you call me Goddaughter,
and you are bound by the laws of Heaven to not leave me yet.
The Lord commands you.

See, the scariest acronym in good old US of A for a spoiled twenty-something
who has both sets of grandparents,
never lost a cousin,
has attended all of two funerals in her life and she didn’t need to cry at either -
that acronym is not FBI, CIA, DEA or even DHS.
It’s ICU.

It’s me seeing you through the glass partition I haven’t even approached yet,
swollen with tubes everywhere,
wires taped to your breasts,
medicinal track marks from IVs in and out of elbows,
skin so pale it matches the roses I brought you.
The roses the nurse will take away because you can’t have flowers in the ICU.
God forbid you should be able to see anything prettier than Vanna White’s face hour after hour after aching hour of not being able to move,
with no breath other the 95% oxygen going into your nose -
you can see me. I see you see me.


ICU where the attending comes by every half hour to adjust a dial,
I see you trying to cough and the nurses holding your shoulders
as if the fluid your lungs betray you by retaining will drown you
if they aren’t careful
if there are roses left on the bureau
next to the couch where your husband barely sleeps,
and your youngest daughter is not allowed to go.
But, I am not a liability. I am over 18.
I am family: the God only the nurse believes in says so.
Still I am denied entrance like my roses,
so I say again,
the Lord is in the ICU.
And I see you.

So. Hail Mary full of Grace,
the Lord is with thee -
I can’t reconcile your last gift to me,
the shoes on my feet.
Let me be barefoot, Ave Maria, and go childlike with grass stains on my toes -
blessed art thou among women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb -
whom I will take to the dog park every weekend,
drive back and forth to track practice,
attend parent-teacher-counselor conferences for,
let terrorize my boyfriend,
teach how to make perfect fried rice and pineapple upside-down cake.

If you open your eyes,
I will give you my lungs.

Open your eyes.
I will give you my lungs.