I’m saving up my wishes

in a dandelion jar

Blowing out the candles,

summer fireflies and stars

Pinning all my dreams

on a broken wing and hope

Tying knots in rainbows,

mending promises I broke

I’m throwing pieces to the wind

and picking up the caution

Bending back the grains of time

til sands bring revolution

Crushing crooked ceilings

and breaking glass beneath

Filling up my pockets

lucky clovers, lost of leaves

I’m writing future history

with ash on paper fear

Painting my new destiny

in wax poetic tears

I’m crossing heart and fingers

hope to die, none left to give

A life will love that lingers

spent, of all I have to live

This piece of double-sided

3M Scotch tape

Will be the adhesive

That will hold my third-grade marker drawing

Of a blue plesiosaur

To my orange wall.

Fully confident in the tape's abilities, I put the extra tape away and walk out of my room.

The next day I return to a horrible sight.

The tape had failed me-

the marker drawing sits on the floor mat like a dead leaf

lifeless, blank side up

fallen from where it had been so carefully taped by my frantic hands the day before.

Moral of the story?

Never trust tape.

Odd ends meet.

I don’t sleep,

In this house of grief.

Sweet melodies and musical laugher no longer fill the air.

All I feel is despair.

God grant me the strength to make it through this day.

I sense such dismay.

Your gentle crinkled smile and loving hand, makes me hold back a choking sob.

Time is a thief I would rob, just to spend one more day with you.

My heart will always ache, for you’re gone and I’ll never get any relief - in my house of grief.

Butterflies can’t fly when they’re cold.

They need warmth, an ideal temperature

of eighty-five degrees.

They don’t just drink sugar water, either.

Sometimes they sip on mud puddles

for minerals and salts.

Their wings are meant to be transparent,

but as they age, the chitin falls off and reveals

colored scales.

It’s not all about the chrysalis. Ugliness,

too, seizes all creatures, and I don’t know

if I was ever whole.

Who is this being?

One killed by his

Own kin, brother

Same flesh & blood

That past, a dark cloud

Later saved by his sister

Now watches over. Osiris,

The powerful being...

O, say I can stare death

In it’s face with no fear

For he rules over it—

Nothing to worry about

Little children, & my dear

I have abundant faith

In him, the one who

Rules over the dead

Ever loving and true..

Please, pass the mead~

*takes a sip*

Right, where was I?

*smiles*

With him I am certain

That I shall face no harm

In this life or the next

Osiris is the very best

Has such a mighty arm

To shield me from the rain

I can go for hours

Singing praise of him

Or dance every second

On his path there’s no bend

The only thing I dream

Of is pleasing Osiris.

Living and breathing

To work hard daily

In order to receive blessings.

(N.B. inspired by and based on ancient Egyptian religious beliefs in, Osiris, the god of fertility, alcohol, vegetation, life, agriculture, the afterlife, death & ressurection).

#OSIRIS.

#HaveFaithChallenge

you promised,

with your eyes,

that this was the last lie,

you’ll ever tell me.

and I believed you,

bending to your will.

you told me,

she meant nothing to you,

so why do your eyes follow her,

like I don’t know that they do.

why?

why?

why?

you took my heart,

and let it implode in the cave of your mouth,

until there was nothing,

nothing,

nothing,

but the sawdust,

which choked up,

my throat,

my lungs,

my ribcage,

everything.

and you wonder why my heart,

stopped beating for you.

She was five years old when her father bestowed her with a mottled gray rabbit’s foot, the size of her little hand and clipped to a delicate golden chain.

“What is this for?” she’d asked, and in response, her father had closed her hand around the amulet, one finger at a time.

“For luck, sweetheart. For when I’m gone.”

“For when you’re gone?” she echoed. “But you’re never going to leave me, right? We’re going to be together forever, right?”

“Right,” her father agreed, but his smile never quite reached his eyes, and later, when the little girl bounded off to show her prize to her mother, his own hands quivered as he twisted open a pill bottle and shuddered when he shook half a dozen into his open palm.

She was seven years old the first time she had to see her father lying in a hospital bed, plastic tubes taped to his skin like spider webs, forehead lined and slick with sweat. He’d been cold to the touch, cold to the world.

“What happened?” she asked her mother, whose eyes hadn’t met hers all night. “Why does daddy look dead? Is he-”

“No,” her mother said abruptly, before exiting the hospital room in a whirl of fabric and coughing.

The girl had reason to suspect that the coughing was a cover up.

She was ten years old the second time it happened.

Ten and a half the third time.

Eleven when he was finally sent away. He’d promised to come back- kneeled down to look her in the eye the way he’d always done when she was little, even though she had grown taller than he was on his knees now- but as she stared into his sunken, dark eyes, she’d clutched her rabbit foot and hoped that the father who returned to her wouldn’t be the one before her now.

She was twelve when he came back, with a renewed flush across his cheeks and the first offer in years to play frisbee.

She was fourteen when his eyes grew dark again, when his hands trembled as he cleared the table after dinner

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” her father had said, “Don’t worry. It’s just because of my job. My coworkers can be a pain in the neck and it’s a lot of hard work. I’m just tired, okay?”

She’d closed her lips against the next words that came to her, swallowed them down into the pit of her stomach. Her mother worked all the time, too. Had been working for longer than her father, had been working harder than her father, and yet she’d never looked like him.

She was sixteen when she found her father hunched over the downstairs toilet, heaving up his stomach. An open bottle of pills lay on the floor next to him, vomit-orange against the marble floor.

This time, she’d been the one to call the ambulance.

This time, she was still the one to stand next to his white hospital bed, rubbing her thumb over the matted surface of that rabbit foot.

She was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen when her father lay against the couch cushions day after day, murmuring to himself in the native Portuguese he'd never taught her, only rising to go to group therapy in the little blue office across from her high school.

Her mother refused to look at him most days, refused to interact with him at all.

So it landed on the girl to drive him there and back, to bring him his dinner, to tell him about her classes, her teachers, her friends, her life, even as he had none of his own. It landed on her to stand by his side even as he stayed incapable of returning the favor.

Every night, before she went to bed, she laid the rabbit foot beneath her pillow, and whispered prayers into the night sky, into her cold home.

“I won’t let you go,” she promised her father every time he asked her to leave. “I won’t let you go.” Somedays, the words felt empty on her tongue, like an unfilled pastry shell. Somedays, she wasn’t sure why she said them at all.

She was twenty-five when she put on her nicest skirt, looped her arm through her mother’s, and shook hands with the friends and family who had gathered.

She was twenty-five when she unfolded a creased piece of paper and began her speech, when tears spilled down her cheeks and past her chin, when she kissed her rabbit foot and tucked it away.

She was twenty-five when she celebrated five years sober with the father she had never let go.

When I opened my eyes this morning, something felt weird. I sat up and looked around for the reason - my Hello Kitty bedspread had wrapped itself into a tight wad overnight like it always did, toys and clothes were strewn all over the floor, and I could hear mom in the kitchen downstairs making breakfast. Just a typical Saturday morning by the looks of it. It wasn't until I took a drink from the cup on my bedstand that it hit me: the water went gushing past my tender upper gum through the gap in my teeth, and it was so startling, I almost choked to death. Then I could harldy contain my excitement because my room had been visited by the tooth fairy, and I felt like I was sitting in the presence of residual greatness.

With my heart pounding and head spinning, I lifted my pillow wondering what sort of magical gift I had received. What I found, however, was no sparkling golden coin from another world; it was just an everyday dollar. It wasn't even a nice, new dollar, it was dogeared and wanted to stand up in a "V" shape like the bills that came out of my dad's wallet.

I stuffed the dollar into my bank and scanned the room one last time for anything sparkling before trudging downstairs and flopping into one of the chairs at the table.

"Good morning," my mom said. "Did the tooth fairy visit you last night?"

"More like the tooth recycling service," I said. "I got a dollar, but there was nothing magical about it."

My mom laughed. "Were you expecting something else?"

Of course I had been. A fairy had visited my room last night. I just shrugged and looked down at the table.

"Well, maybe she'll bring you something else next time," she said. "Maybe she'll leave some fairy dust in your room. Would you like that?"

I nodded and picked at the scrambled eggs she'd just set in front of me.

"Except how will she know to leave it? And how did she even get a dollar into my room? It's probably bigger than she is."

"Magic?" my mom suggested.

It seemed like a reasonable explanation, but the whole experience was still strange and disappointing. I'm not going to say I don't believe in fairies (because we all know the consequences of that), but I now consider myself a skeptic and am working hard at loosening my next tooth to find out what happens when she visits again.

A tightness just below my heart threatens to suffocate my lungs and patience wears thin. The skin on my forehead forms mounds that may remain permenant features at this rate as I watch a very solid mahogany door. No noise comes through, no light shines neath it’s bottom edge- only darkness encases its stained patterns.

Something scuttles past, an extra shadow cast on the floor. It pauses as if looking at the door. My heart picks up in tempo and my muscles tense, ready to run. Does she suspect? Has she found me?

The shadow grows in size as she approaches the door which creaks eerily as small hands push hard on the heavy wood. With the click of a switch, light floods the room and I adjust to remain in the shadow of a dresser. She enters.

”Mommmy?” she calls with a giggle. I shuffle in my spot, eager to jump and grab her off the ground.

She ducks under the bed and then waddles to the closet. I smile excited as she makes her way to me. Because no matter what-

“Mommy! I found you!” she jumps on my lap and laughs, I pull her close in a tight embrace.

And I will always find you.