I love the way I did as a little girl:
best in empty rooms. Babble filling my mouth
and dribbling, my tongue roseate
with the breath of my own name. A caboodle
on the bed — each chamber beating
with tiny glass bottles. Beside it, two
grinning dolls talk of their husbands,
both magicians. One sprouts daisies
from his hands on Fridays, makes Kool-Aid
and cupcakes for dinner, stirring
into them the sweet of the air
with arms pre-crooked for his wife’s embrace.
This one is a doctor, a lawyer, a model,
lies rigid on top, never makes demands
and cannot remove her clothes. They shiver loose
after one knock of his polyvinyl lips
and a pair of gigantic hands. I dreamed then:
perfectly-sized to fit any room I could
get my fingers into. Everything
in the future looked like Malibu:
palm-treed and sunned — even I was tan,
with spindly legs and conical breasts,
prancing my permanently arched feet
across a bedspread. I see that girl-self
now, holding every object close
enough for her bifocals to transform it
into a life beyond the bounds of Pines Road.
If I could step into that room to show her
what I’ve become, prove that nothing
would end her, not drive-bys nor
the horned puppet who hisses
at scripture in Sunday School, I’d wait
outside the door, letting her peel
her hot pink dreams open like
Now-and-Laters. I’m not sure she’d need
anything more than an adult’s
undistracted gaze, a tending ear.
And what I want most to tell her — that she was right
in her utter belief she could build a world
and live in it alone; or that she will one day greet
the sag of her imperfect breasts with a murmur
of indulgence, the way she dissolves
a boll of cotton candy into syrup laced
with her DNA, or sips the remains
of rainbow-speckled milk from pilfered
cups of cereal — I cannot say.
It is a singular, decadent life, a truth I know
would kill her, or make her
murderous in its knowing.
Her
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