The little girl who had forgotten the story of her mother's dogwood walked around her yard in socks. Her boots hung by a knot in their laces over her shoulder. She walked with her head turned up toward the sky, her ears taking ecstasy in each crunch, but she shivered with the knowledge that Winter would soon come, carrying with it the chills and the biting, gnawing, wretchedness of a season without sunshine.

To look only behind you is a painful existence. There is a reason that my grandmother will not speak of her history, of the trauma that gripped her childhood. The future is brighter, the time to come more opportunistic than the time before. She would press her palm to my cheek.

"Don't forget it."

For months now, I have forgotten what comes next. For months been unable to plan or predict. I see only the rubble that rubs off my feet at each bus stop, each train stop, each rest stop on this path. Exhausting, it is always, this neck turned behind me. It feels as though I walk towards the past, not away from it. My chest tight, near bursting with the pressure of my shirt buttons and the weight of last Monday.

Writing poetry is taking a deep breath

of air conditioning on a muggy day, it is

forgetting that boy, that girl who

says those things, those words that

make you feel like the air

is water, and

I cannot teach you how to love the way

words float off your tongue or

how to find joy in the snappy phrases and

pauses between lines because

you will not understand

until you stumble over it

yourself.

a smell has just reminded me of

childhood retching,

fresh, near sterile water and

the foulness of my breath,

of a heaving,

a pouring,

of my insides out.

A need to annotate on the margin of morning,

quivers, pattern disturbed.

Still dubious that what is inside

will stay there,

or that it should,

only trusting that poetry

can make anything sound pretty.

Three quotes that were popular on my day of this year,

The first:

"Too much perfection is a mistake"

Attempted sympathy that a cynic turned near optimist choked down

with three grapes,

and a bite of too ripe nectarine, 

and two rolls of her left eye. 

Sixteen years working to see that

striving for perfection will get you three steps from nowhere,

but accepting that your own perfection exists,

is a peace all its own, so

please keep your negativity away from me I'm

trying to make happy. 

The second:

"I am a museum full of art

but you had your eyes closed"

written by a poet turned icon,

for girls with blame seeping out of their eyelids, 

a need for someone else to be at fault for their half-shaken tickers. 

Came to terms with the idea that he saw my art, 

and decided it wasn't for him. 

The last:

"For the ones who dream of stranger worlds."

Music stopped playing, or didn't, but I can't hear it-

our world is strange enough

men who protect are killing because they are scared of a color,

men who rule will not let the bravest protect because they came out, 

men fight over land that

was not ours to begin with 

land that 

we cannot claim,

it is shared amongst,

you and i, and the honeybees, butterflies. 

She kept the words

"Too much perfection is a mistake"

tattooed in pen ink on her forearm, 

over a scar she wouldn't talk about. 

The words not for their 

cliched sympathetic tone,

but for the confusion with which she first read them. 

For perfection- is just that.

To most, mistakes, flaws, drip negativity,

but to a girl with no windows,

only candles dancing on ochre,

tea steaming,

a mistake was too perfect. 

The kind of sand that makes mountains in the right light. 

Two inch dunes, shadowed and lit, 

the dark almost purple, 

the light as you'd expect it, 

warm and inviting, 

and running on this beach with you, 

I've climbed mountains and molehills. 

Silence is a friend of mine,

silver locks frame her face,

and she smiles - sometimes she doesn't - 

but anyone who smiles all the time can't be trusted.

Our first encounter was discouraging, 

her, the reaper of loneliness, in my eyes,

me, a raucous writhing of limbs, in hers. 

But now we sit on Saturdays

drinking tea and taking in the things we can't 

block out.