30/30 Day 10

The Only Thing Here

1.
She drink coffee
She laugh at tea
She wear steel toe boots in the dessert
She will only watch me touch myself
She throw her head back and laugh at my hands cramped
She no one I know
She got hair on half her head
She got thick lines in her lips
She don’t let me want to feel them
She birth mouths and teeth and leave them in the oasis
She the only thing here

2.
I am the woman at the end of a beach town dead end street
Who knows exactly when the slap board walls are going to salt.

I am afraid of hurricanes
Family photos gone with the rip tide.

I cannot dance with my mother inside me
I cannot come undone from our body.

I am scared that my frame is a failure
That I was used before I even came out.

3.
Wind makes me panic,
Litany everything that could be lost,
Scramble to measure mother’s weight
In ratio to the knots of gusting clouds—

Hurricanes find me watching her feet
A small nest I am to tend.
Single blink of my obnoxiously long lashes--
Her stolen opportunity to spring up

A woman’s desire
To be swept into the storm,
So transparent to a child’s
Always racing heart.