Colorado Blood

Colorado Blood // Kat

I. Mama was born before there was much of anything, in a city with a stretch of road that marked downtown with the untamed still clawing for the humans developed.

Mama left when she was seventeen, headed off for the far reaches of the country, escaped the broken down remnants of family and self.

Sister never left. Except for one year — disappeared into a frozen wasteland, soon became a thin icicle grown sideways. And only when she returned to Colorado did she begin to melt, thaw, pool into something once more recognizable, blooming again with the columbines that sit patiently.

Daddy came later, to the mountains I return to.

Young, drawn by landscape of misgivings. His eyes clear in this air, return to the sharp blue of the sky. His memories lay stuffed under the windowseat I don’t like to sit on.

Daddy met Mama in the places I now stand, the floor I walk across, the trails that stretch out before me.

I feel pieces of me reclaimed, pieces I can’t reach or hold on to. They come back to me sleepily, carefully, in the lilacs blooming, the fluttering of Aspen green, the cotton that floats down to me, landing in my eyelashes like snow.

My blood flows with the west, generations pushing against the horizons, roots now growing into the cracking mud.

My grandmother’s irises bloom in a square plot of earth surrounded by cement, each year a different shade of purple — from pale violent to flushes of eggplant. Veins of her blossoming up from the garden I walk through.

My uncle grows her each spring and summer. Mama stands at the corner, the purple so brilliant it’s hard to look at.

II. When I leave the irises and horizons, I always glance back at the physical manifestation of my own flesh and blood.

Purple running through my veins and out into the meadows, cracks, splits in trunks, softest of clouds, and places I have to crane my neck to glimpse.