That She Might Bond to Me, Covalently

I held Riley in my arms…

I flew, carving star flecked heavens

and etching wild grass to triumph underfoot.

Of the east I beckoned the rise. And

of the west I bade the set.

I gasped streams that ebbed breath

and shouted rocks that rose to fortress.

I gnarled my wrists to branches

and twisted my toes to roots. I stood erect,

a tree of knowledge,

that some might be spared,

that the stiff chutes of arteries might bear life,

that the veins then might imbibe death.

Then I ripped my childhood

into strips. I

wove them, tattered, and

adorned them, scattered,

around her neck,

that she might hold my

childhood as her own,

a world with four walls.

I held Riley in my arms as she wheezed through her breathing apparatus.

She will never heed the lessons of the circle hole and the square peg,

it’s that wisdom that eludes me now. I’m whispering triangles and cussing squares,

I will not see it.

The essence of fluorescence holds me taut, now,

a tree of false fruit. That I may be His equal. That God

may enter her lungs and do anything save choke.

She coughs on a breath, We forgot how make air small enough for her.

We shouldn’t have rested on the seventh.

The pegs just won’t fit. Suddenly I’m eight and in preschool and crying, and she never will be.