Pizza place, we're retouched in gold. Something desperate it is that you hold wide in you hands as you explain as always. Maybe I had something to say to you then. That moment's gone missing. Pizza place, we're retouched in gold. Its accolades in want of mantles, walls, even. Its accolades hanging otherwise poltergeistically in the chill that worries my spine.
making honey sweet honey colored music and light you see, California is a melange of the senses dressed in warmth. Warmth, effusive from which I might be smelted. California, damp cool mornings ease you into afternoons measured in miles, not in hours, time is a unit between the changes of the tide.
Somewhere in the reaching haze of California's morning, hand in hand with it, somewhere in the reaching haze, my heart, from which it might be smelted, my heart, hand in hand with it, the bed is deep and wide--
deep and wide--
and rolling with blankets, a bookcase, books overflowing onto the floor tied up in the curtain strings swirled in ambers, with bees and poppies, sand and bare legs, wind in my long hair, tangled shadow of eucalyptus, avocado, hills and hills, cliffs and sprays,
safety that predates danger, safety without questioning, eternal breakfast tables with halves of limes, stale tortillas, something sweet in tin foil, picked at at hours throughout the night, where we sit sat, sit, are sitting now, then, now and then, and always are sitting, smiles cooled with mist, clocks calmed by the touch of the sun, and all I want for breakfast is the salt of the sea, and the day before me, like never before, is delicious. California breeze possesses my limbs, graceful, tan, strong all that is meaningful about my body hangs in the white break of wave and wave and wave and wave and wave and I am as much an occurrence as I am a thing beheld in eyes --I linger in the lilt of the sand-- as much as California haunts my bedroom I haunt California's palm song, mute in my mind, my heart has a voice there.
When I am absorbed into my walls at night and my bed no longer supports but overtakes me, when clanging words knock against my ears I close my eyes and in my body feel, sweet as jasmine on the briny air, the endless flaxen totality of
My mother's hands touch my mother's wrinkles in my mother's face.
In my family, the matriarchal lineage is codified in tears.
It is her tired, curtained cheeks that rose through my rebellions- like a son starts to bald- which, six years in exile, returned me to a sense of family.
My hands burn under dishwater. I sleep in late, now, too; I understand.
My mother's hands pick up each cucumber on display, weighing them against each other, looking for the smallest one.
In California, a cucumber is sixty nine cents by the each. These are two ninety eight by the pound.
And cream cheese, and sprouts, for cream cheese cucumber sprout sandwiches
that we used to have, the white bread sticking to the roofs of our mouths.
I cannot find sprouts. The bread is wrong, I cry. My mother's hands, lobster-red and lobster-hard, put together a sandwich for me tonight they
transcend the West coast, pray
to an icon through which I might connect to what it was I came from, and still
wipe cheeks before the tears can further erode our history in my face.
I
knew I didn't have any dollar bills, the lunch line wasn't an option
today. I turned the puddle of nickels over in my palm. The California
sun or the light of childhood memories made or makes the crumbs of my
lesson money reverberate with liquid silver. Everything in the
vending machine was more than 65 cents. I'd have to try to sneak off
campus to get to the Albertsons on Longhorn Drive.
I sat
with uncharacteristically bad posture, breathing in my classmates'
lunches. Peanut butter. Pizza. Chicken strips. Lunch period talk in
the band office was of the new Maslanka symphony, the wailing mother
trombones in movement one, and the new piece whose title was an
incomplete line of the Lord's Prayer. Bread. Banana. $1.00. A flute
player unwrapped her muffin. Blueberry. Muffins, $1.50. “Where's
your lunch, Brittany?” My teacher's question shot through the
chatter. “Oh. Oh, it's okay.” Green paper fluttered into my field
of vision. “Go get lunch.” Bread. “Oh, no, no, it's okay, it's,
I'm okay.” Bread. “Take it.”
“Take
it.” I shouldn't have told him. I didn't even particularly want to
see her again. “No, I can't, professor. It's okay, I'll call my mom
and see, or I can work out a payment plan. Or I'll... I can't take
this.” Thirty dollars was a lot more than five. Therapy was a lot
more than bread, although it was bread I had faith in. “Call Betsy
and make an appointment for next week.” I didn't need therapy twice
a week. Once a month at the most. She'd already cut my bill to the
lowest possible she was allowed to accept. Desperate to make rent
(which I didn't end up making anyway), I'd cut back on the
none-essentials. I cut a lot more. And this man, who'd already given
me thousands of dollars of the university's money, gambled on me (and
lost, as it turned out, four years and zero Bachelor's degrees
later), and put up with so much of me, had noticed, and was making an
offer on his peace of mind. And I sold it to him. “Okay. Thank you.
Thanks. I'll call her in the morning.” “Promise? You will call
her tomorrow?” “Yeah, I will. Thanks. I definitely will. Thank
you.” I tucked the crisp, square money in the securely-hole free
front left pocket of my jeans, walked home in the perpetually
noontime Tucson sun, and tried to fall asleep before I felt hungry
again.
...grew up in San Diego, California and attended the University of Arizona. She lives in Seattle, Washington, where she continues to explore poetry and creative writing with the hope of further developing her craft. Poetreatise is the virtual venue for her newest work.
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