I think of his fingernails
carving the outlines of nightmares into
the tender skin on the inside
of your seven-year old thighs.

You have floated all over this country,
appeared to strangers as an apparition,
left no blade of grass rooted in
the soil of your mind,
and still you do not know where
he hid the skin he stole.

I’ve studied the cuts in your flesh.
I’ve seen those types of marks before.
They’re left by lightening.

I imagine the weight that grows on your chest
every time you are reminded of that sizzle in your nose:
when you smell charcoal
or feel the heat of a bonfire on the beach.

Spelling tests and dirty socks crinkle,
shrink in the flames beneath your bed
as you’re standing two blocks down
in the cold, dripping with rain.

Lost objects, so lost,
you never knew they were missing.

He has been at sea for a thousand days.
His crew grows mutinous. And so, it seems,
do his extremities: his very skeleton aches
and sighs. The soft hair on his thighs goose
pimples. His face adopts a twitch.
The muscles whisper of rebellion.
His mustache plans a coup.
It is noon. The navigator’s vertebrae
click in anticipation. The fog sings soft, electrically.
Two low clouds part, leave room for destiny
to be seen. In the absence of breathing
you can hear the heat of the sun.

I am as if an apparition. I bless him
with my pale sands and the rocks
that dot my jagged coastline.
Rich green vegetation twists
in spirals around my dusty flesh.
He kneels to kiss the waves
that lap against my knees.

He makes his camp in the crook
of my elbow, so happy to have
discovered this home.
As he sleeps, I rock him back and forth,
tilt him towards the easier side
of dreaming, and wonder how soon
he will find that I am
no New World.

“Sonsabitches,”
my mothers mother would mutter
and the nails of my father’s
rough tan hand would sting,
sunk deep into my mother’s soft palm.
It was an infamous phrase Nelly mostly used
in the direction of hundreds of bingo operators.

I can’t imagine my father’s mother
ever swore in in his presence:
Her name was Ruth. I called her Mim.
She would have stolen me anything
I wanted from Drug Emporium.
We walked there when she baby-sat me,
in between biscuit baking and dancing
to Michael Jackson videos on the television.
I wanted a soft bunny with a jean jacket.
She slipped it into her purse.

Later, I applied lipstick to Bunny’s small mouth.
When it didn’t come off,
I cried and cried and cried.

When Harry brought Jeane home to meet
his mother I never heard him call Mom,
Ruth cried. With happiness at seeing my
father’s arm around my mother’s small shoulders.
In Ruth, Jeane found another mother.
I’ve wondered about their relationship for years.

My mother gave me the sunflowers in my eyes.
Nelly gave Jeane her panic attacks.
My mother ran into her mother’s doctor in a hospital one night. “You may not remember me, but you gave my mother, Nelly Hugues, medication.” “Medication? Oh, I remember you, but I never gave Nelly meds. Those were sugar pills.”

Ruth gave everyone presents from Jomar.
“Oh, yeah, I really thought you’d like this,”
with a large ceramic turtle in her hands.

My mother teaches second grade and hugs everyone.
My father has never told me he loves me,
but after my first teenage relationship
went down the drain, we made a mess
of pots and pans on the kitchen floor,
banging on them and giggling.

Ruth was unable to watch me
by the time I reached big kid school.
My mother followed me there, from teaching kindergarten
at Bright Beginnings to third grade at St. Anselm.
My father visited Ruth in the nursing home
every Wednesday. She watched Highlander.
Soon, she didn’t know his name.

When I think back as far as I can,
my first memory is in a room
in the back of my mother’s parents’ apartment.
There is a trunk filled with odds and ends.
I have selected a tiny turtle figurine.
It is smooth and we have fallen in love.
Grandmom Nelly says I can have it.
He is warm from hiding in the cave of my palm.

Nelly and Ruth both died before
I was old enough to ask them
the questions I ask my parents today,
hoping for a glimmer of
grandmother-voice to peak through.
I’m not sure who’s responsible
for taking away old people
from the realm of the living,
but precedent requires
I refer to them as
“Sonsabitches.”

If I were you,
my kayaks would be full of holes
and sink with the weight
of a bottomless want.

If you were me,
your poems would curve
towards the sky,
yield to the water,
find their roots in the earth,
and drift homeless.

We is the space between you and me,
and that space is jaded by growth and time.
Your ribs forget what your spine looks like.
Your toes dream of nuzzling your eyes.
Your octet and your sestet
lay ripped apart on separate sides of the room.
Your medulla oblongata hasn’t spoken
to your belly button in years.

You’re drifting over Lake Kayuga.
You do not slice. You paint the water,
spread it soft like peanut butter.

You’re holding your breathe beneath the waves.
Then, with a barely conscious movement,
the sun’s on your wet body.
A butterfly roll, you call it.

In a field, far away,
the freckles on my back
lace fingers with the grass.
Larvae inch around the blades
in minuscule embraces.
My eyes spread the sky,
roll in the sensation like
a hand dipped into a sack of grain,
like feet sunk in hot blue sand.

Us is a creature formed of relative distance.
Together, there is power
to silence even gulls.
Yet, their tracks on the wet sand span
lonely miles, along an
asymmetrical thread thinning
and thinning, regardless
of who pulls it
or who hangs on.

I used to dream I was pregnant,
my stomach a porcelain bowl
of milk and cereal,
and I would wobble
with the weight
over stones at the coast
of the beach.
If I fell into the water
my limbs would expand:
numb, prickling,
packed with sand.
My lungs
and my baby’s lungs
would fill with water.

My mother spent three years
trying to grow me in her belly.
I have always carried that weight.

Now, trees droop with fuzzy auras
of yellow-green leaves in the spring.
My uncle catches a dark
round fish in the
Delaware Bay.
I lay in bed, awake,
and feel inverted,
staring at my hip bones.