DECEIVED
Darkness glistens
Like hot skin
Drawing me in
But touching my fingertips, feels cold
My hand snaps back
Surprised
I rub my fingers with my thumb
Melting the frosty film between
Then dry them on my jeans
As I turn to run
WINTER MORNINGS
Warm blankets and soft sweats
I don’t want to move
I want to stay
Pull the puffy down comforter to my neck
Listen to the icy wind
On the other side of my window
Close my eyes
And just stay
VINES AND ROSES
I want to write beauty
Words that wrap and wind around each other
Like vines and roses
Strong and rich
Living and breathing out air heavy with the fragrance of mystery
Yet light enough to ride along a breeze
STORYTELLERS
I want to tell a story
Not mine but Another’s
Already written yet still being told
This story lives
And I live inside its words – because of its words
They are written on my arms, across my face
Upon my beating heart, drifting on the wind that leaves my lungs
Words unrecognizable
Symbols and signs from another time, another place
Perhaps never spoken but by One
And yet they speak of me
Of you, of all
They are every story
And the only story
One that was and is and will be told
Wont you tell me?
And I will tell you…
When I was little, my mother used to wince at the sight of it. 42 stitches from my scalp to my eyebrow. There are others…smaller ones…including the one inside my upper lip. Sometimes, I still run my tongue up and down the jagged ridge that cuts from the edge of my lip to where the skin meets my gums.
The memory is my mother’s, not mine. An empty aquarium shattering over the hard skull of her 14 month old daughter. Blood. Deep red. Heavy.
Washing glass from her little one’s hair while she waited for the ambulance.
“No time!” the police officer shouts. “I’ll drive you in my car.”
My father screaming, blaming. The officer leaves him behind.
Doctors whisking her baby girl into surgery.
“Will she be okay?”
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
Wait and see…and be questioned by protective services. It’s the standard protocol, they tell her.
Wait with empty arms as her little girl sleeps a dreamless sleep in a cold, sterile room down the hall. Wait as they pick glass splinters from her baby’s soft skin, as they stitch the broken, delicate flesh together. Wait and see the new face. The face of a memory she can never forget.
A memory I can never remember.
In the mirror, I see the only face I’ve ever known. Scars from a memory I own but cannot find.
I don’t remember my father screaming or the officer leaving him behind. I don’t remember my father much at all. But he left a scar too. Sometimes I can feel it – running along the outside of my heart -the jagged edges I sewed together to close up the cavity he left when he left us behind. It’s not a pretty scar. I was only a child, not a surgeon. But I needed to stop the bleeding…to keep the life from spilling out of me…to stop the world from getting in.
Like the scars on my face, this heart-scar is a part of me. It’s the only heart I’ve ever known, shaped by so many memories: memories I love and memories I loathe, memories I can’t remember and memories I never made at all, but could have, had he stayed.
Scarred hearts beat funny sometimes. And they ache…for what was taken and what was never let in.
Looking in the mirror, I ask The Surgeon, “Will she be okay?”
He gently rests a hand – a hand carrying scars of his own – on my heart. Knowingly, his eyes smile into mine as he whispers, “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Lightning Bug 