Fudge Sleep Chocolate melting between layers of skin tantalizes, sweet and thick as an afternoon drifts off the pages of my mother’s picture books. I can’t help but spread it across my lips, face and hands. Her breath comes out in slow whispers, keeping time to the heavy flutter of eyelids. Clenching my body in soft delight, the cacao colors my teeth in brown smudges. When my fingers were sticky with orange macaroni residue they would turn the pages extra slowly, cherishing Mother’s next sentence. Another bite of the chocolate reminds me that—yes . It was mother who would sleep under the weight of a hot afternoon and then dump me quietly in a heap beneath my “tent” or “special spot”. She’d rouse herself and then get to back breaking, cloroxing the chocolate and macaroni fingerprints from her walls. Chocolate bubbles into the back of my mouth and, for a peaceful instant, the macaroni printed pages co-exist with chocolate bars and Mother- Mother’s hum dripping in time to my burning desire for more melting chocolate.
Repulsion He said she could draw chalk pictures with her toes like fingers and tree roots. Not much for performance but they’d be a start on walking and running in rain. It was feathering wet beads when they left the park that day. Slugs squished between her free flying toes, one slippery pustule at a time.
Autumn Natural Leaves claw, clutch and cling. Through the wicker branches of a maple recycling itself, I can catch my sweet death e drop drop drop of sunlight washing wet on my cheeks. Where the summer days once blew up my skirts, a shameful chunk of truth soaks me in rivers of red and orange. Those nights, in our weathered hammock were Hansel and Gretel‌they, like us, were left with no place to drift. I can’t breathe or scream or move as reds rattle summer down in torrents of leaves.
Quarter-Life Crisis This shoebox goes on with laces undone skittering somewhere between a canyon and a crevice. It’s disjointed arm bends and snaps without intention or purpose. These reds and browns are yards and yards of roping hair that was never much for styling. we’ve got years to tread this reeling circle of spine twisting poses. This rock without time or sunshine wasn’t a rod from the start. None can follow the bread and cheese digesting in the cavity of Mother Earth’s tooth… No. We’ve got to slump past the hip hugging ducts squeezing our limbs into this unfamiliar slot land. The horse shoe bend cleaned out of what once was real rock is just that a break.
Metaphor The guy at the pulpit is talking about miracles. Apparently, his vegetable brother was healed after fermenting between the sheets of a hospital bed for nearly two months solid. A bloody run through with a motorbike twice his size left him lifeless as the greens growing yellow in his parched garden. My sister’s eyebrows are squinty as she listens to the man with the pulpit pounding story. At six she’s got the expression of a world going bankrupt. Her jaw bounces on rusty hinges about half way through the conveyance of the miracle. Blinking back congealed tears, she holds her hands out in a pathetic gesture of childlike sorrow. When I ask the kid what’s eating her, she gulps and says, “That’s just so sad… that man…his brother…he was just… squash.”
The Days Yellow orange juice waters her throat while daisy petals greet stilettos tripping into white light. Five hours into the time clock and the thirst for wind has driven her to the balcony on floor number five of a small corporate office. Wall flowers don’t get much attention, and neither do the monsters lurking inside stale cups of coffee. Heat reverberates leaving craters in her parking space. Dark filters through a door expanding and shrinking with the moisture from a leaking roof. Dinner, dishes, deep fried self pity. A laundry list of places, and people left undone indicates that, once again, there is no time to massage blunt ended ambition.
GENERAION HOUSEWIFE Dear Generation Housewife, This is a documentation based on the construction of Cold Cuts dealt consecutively by a woman: I can’t build toward this, Mother used to think at the brown paper bags she blatantly stuffed with empty calorie tears as she wondered, who what where am I? God bless the housewife happy in her dishes. May they never be replaced with white-washed wishes. Until the next improved model I am. Yours,
Revelations I see it in the fabric of your smile, fleeting to the shadows. -Rayla Gomez Stained pieces of your past spilling around me in tangy, eye-watering sticky -the impending come apart. Let’s toast, you and me, to chocolate covered beasty prowlers: here’s to your core. These plunders flapping in the gale of a break down fray tips of your hide, teeth, and clothes. Here’s to artificialthis unknotting of a braided face, whipping in the licorice colored night. An odorous fail roams over the moors of you and me, on a hope that one day you- you and your taffy stuck sever will come back from five a.m. episodes of sweaty, compulsive shaking. I will stitch up your fears and serve them under your broken skin and, like a welt, it scars. Here’s to the guilt, tripper, here’s to the guilt- to the deception, the guilt. I cannot feed your nightmare or drink portions of what wasn’t shared.
Nancy floats into my room. It’s two a.m. and she whimpers that yes, he’s got her under the memory machine. There’s a color tripping off the side of my tongue as snow leaks between layers of mud. We step into the dark, choking down bitter stars. Mud and absence of color blackhole each syllable. She says she can’t breathe inside this house. “Last time he had me I was thirteen,” she whispers, as sweat- sweatsweat. Multiplying in tiny pools on her forehead. I take her fingertips in my own, pressing the lilied scent. She spews constellations while I swallow. Hours skip a merry-go-round between the stitches of our flannel bottoms. One step away from her and she starts twitching the traditional dance of hollowness. “Not yet. Not yet.”
Aqua Marine He opened a box of postcards, on the day that Marge, his mother, died, chuckling at how her bleached-flour-skin would rust, leather tough in sunshine. She went to the beach on the second week of almost every month, blowing kisses under the brim of her pastel hat, pretending she didn’t want gone. Faking roses and hearts in her fuchsia lipstick, she’d say, “Honey, you’re my big man now. Help nanna watch your sister good while mommy catches sunshine.” A week after Marge’s sunshine spree, post cards came in stacks of threes and fives, holograming the glitter of a thousand computer-enhanced, blue-water beaches. Five for Sunday- three for Monday and on Tuesday, they stopped. Because the longer she was gone, the less she fooled herself into missing pasty, jam speckled fingers and snot-nosed-high-pitched screams.
When he lost the second tooth on his top gums, he called Marge. While on the white sands, she bought a phony picture of a beached whale smiling at the dentist who was victoriously holding up am artificial tooth. Beach water isn’t aqua marine blue. Whales don’t have teeth. Crying at mite bitten postcards only made his eyes sting, salty and flooded. Postcards, funerals, poetry. They make him want gone more than a skin cancered mother. Just the first two and the last two lines have to be the same with this.