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Tracing Cracks in Concrete

My childhood is a story my mother tells about a girl I'm learning to remember.

She is the girl
who wakes with the sun every morning
to sing with the birds.
She is the girl
who plops into mud puddles
just to feel it ooze between her toes.
She is the girl
who rides on her babysitter's handlebars,
a push pop in her pudgy hand.
She is the girl
who doesn't mind when her sister steals all her toys,
to see if she will scream.
She is the girl
who unabashedly runs up to a stranger
and holds out her heart.

Because

I am the girl
who lurches out of bed in the morning
a muddy murk encircling my brain.
I am the girl
who winces at the rain
and hides behind the windows.
I am the girl
who twists her fingers on the keyboard
restricting friendship to memo.
I am the girl
who squabbles with siblings
feeding anger and doubt in self-righteous possession.
I am the girl
who walks alone, eyes downcast
tracing cracks in the concrete.

and now I need to
reconnect.


Clear Enough

In the ice
she waits,
the clammy construction
of four years making
that settles against her skin.

She snakes
her shivering arms
around her stomach.
Her breath misting
around her nose,
around her chapped lips
that freeze together
in a timid smile.

She never wanted to live here,
the igloo that he and the kids built,
wrapped in New York winter
with the cool winter sun
gliding against the ice blocks
almost clear enough
to take a glimpse
of the passing season.

Tracing Cracks in Concrete

My childhood is a story my mother tells about a girl I'm learning to remember.

She is the girl
who wakes with the sun every morning
to sing with the birds.
She is the girl
who plops into mud puddles
just to feel it ooze between her toes.
She is the girl
who rides on her babysitter's handlebars,
a push pop in her pudgy hand.
She is the girl
who doesn't mind when her sister steals her toys,
to see if she will scream.
She is the girl
who unabashedly runs up to a stranger
and holds out her heart.

Because

I am the girl
who lurches out of bed in the morning
a muddy murk encircling my brain.
I am the girl
who winces at the rain
and hides behind the windows.
I am the girl
who twists her fingers on the keyboard
restricting friendship to memo.
I am the girl
who squabbles with siblings
feeding anger and doubt in self-righteous possession.
I am the girl
who walks alone, eyes downcast
tracing cracks in the concrete.

and now I need to
reconnect.

So much of who I was and who I am are locked in the past. It takes that rusty crowbar to reach into the dust and drag out the truth. The truth is in tale and letter, soul and song. It falls out of darkness and lights the way. It begins.
My mom was living with a friend; on her way to getting a divorce when she found out I was pregnant. It was her, my older brother Benj and my older sister Becki living on the pullout sofa. I have letters she wrote the March when I was conceived. It’s surreal to read them; knowing and seeing how miserable she is and know that I’m there too, hiding away in her uterus, like a sneak attack. She hadn’t yet moved out at that point.
My biological father, Doug, wasn’t faithful. There’s a list of his affairs in one of the letters Mom wrote, Kathy H, Kathy P, Kay, Monique, Jeana, Dixie, Kitty. Kitty was the most current one, in fact he was still seeing her when mom found out she was pregnant with me. And it was quite a surprise, my mother had been on the pill for quite some time, but she had a kidney infection so she was also taking antibiotics. This was before they knew that antibiotics crippled the effectiveness of the pill.

Clear Enough

In the ice
she waits,
the clammy construction
of four years making
that settles against her skin.

She snakes
her shivering arms
around her stomach.
Her breath misting
around her nose,
around her chapped lips
that freeze together
in a timid smile.

She never wanted to live here,
the igloo that he and the kids built,
wrapped in New York winter
with the cool winter sun
gliding against the ice blocks
almost clear enough
to take a glimpse
of the passing season.

Already sick, my mother was advised to abort me. I was the third child who had a negative ionic charge to my blood, and since Mom’s charge was positive, her body would fight me off.
She didn’t have a job. She got pregnant with my brother when she was twenty years old and in college, so she dropped out to get married and raise Doug’s kids. She didn’t have the skills or time to get a job and take care of Benj and Becki so she had to go back to Doug.

The hang-ups

And he doesn't change.
The fertile tree
sows his arrogant display
of virile colors
that drift

to polinate..

So Mom moved back in with Doug who was rarely ever home. And Doug would sit up with Kitty’s children in the hospital where she would beg him to be the father of her children. And our Mom played his mother, she kept track of the bills, wiped our runny noses, called his boss when he was running late and too afraid to do it himself. She took care of him even when the doctors had ordered her to twenty-four hours of bed rest due to her pregnancy complications.
In fact most women would complain about putting on pounds and losing their figure when they were going through pregnancy.
My mother, was wasting away.
She lost weight at an astonishing rate, but she couldn’t rest in bed. She had to watch Benj and Becki. She had to feed them, clothe them, teach them, love them.
But she was still battling her kidney infection and her body was trying to battle the baby that had bloomed in her womb. She went repeatedly in and out of the doctor’s office. Through her previous pregnancies she had never had so much trouble before labor.
Her first child, my brother Benjamin, was so large that the doctors had to pull him out with forceps. This scared my mother so much that when she was pregnant with my sister Becki, two years later, she took up smoking in hopes tat Becki would not be as large as Benj turned out to be. She didn’t. And she didn’t have to worry the same with me.
I wasn’t close to being large. I was close to the grave.
During the third trimester the doctors revealed that my mother’s womb was no longer producing amniotic fluid, the fluid that serves as a secondary source of nutrition for the unborn baby. The doctors projected that I would soon die. Every two weeks my mother would go in for a fetal stress test. This test would tell them if I were still a living fetus, each time Mom would go in, wondering if when she came out she would still be my mother.
I was supposed to be born December fourteenth, a fiery Sagittarius.
I was two weeks late.
Mom’s contractions started on Christmas. It has always been my favorite holiday, despite that it cheats me out of presents on my birthday. It’s the season of giving, and finding, of surprise. But my Mom wasn’t ready to have me on Christmas. On the way to spend the festivities with her father she prayed and asked me to wait. For one of the few times in my life I showed Christmas restraint and waited for three days until my winter debut.
I was very insistent at two-o’clock that morning. I think it was the snow that called to me, pillowed in heaps around our town in upstate New York. Mom called a neighbor to watch over Benj and Becki as Doug drove her to the hospital. Mom sat in the car, windows down. Her suncken olive eyes were searching the darkness between contractions. Weariness fell over her in waves as she rested her hand against her stomach, praying for patience and strength. The hospital lit out of the distance. She sat up a little straighter in anticipation.
They walked into the hospital; inside the light blinded and people quickly whirled them about as the nurses efficiently put everyone where they belonged.


Ripples

The morning after,
the storm came.
It fell like a rippled sheet
on an unmade bed.

The city buildings
lumped under the ice
as teddy bears,
Cabbage Patch dolls
a jack-in-the-box.

The ice storm that covered Oswego after my birth made it impossible for anyone to visit Mom and I in the hospital. So we bonded, my world encased within my mothers arms. Though she had so much trouble carrying me the labor was quiet, almost peaceful as I came into the world with the sun shining brightly against the crystal landscape.
The second day my mom was in the hospital, the birth ward organized all the recent mothers into a room to teach them about their babies. The most well mannered of the babies was brought out to be examined by the different mothers who with tentative prodding fingers would seek out the soft space where the skull is not yet closed.
I put up with this through the first few mothers but began to wail as I was passed from stranger to stranger. Finally I was passed into my mother’s arms, where her smell, skin, and voice comforted me, and my tears stopped.
“Hush child, no one is going to hurt you…”
Texas

Heat doesn’t last.
Burning sun-swept sand
sighs loosely against the earth
too fickle to stabilize roots.

So you carry your own with you
Black dirt,
dirt of the forests and the leaves
dirt of the shade and the snow
dark dirt you dip your toes into
when it's too hot to stand