Inside

I wake remembering that there had been much more, but the image at the top of sticks, the picture passenger for today, is that of a large and long cast on my arm. Left or right, difficult for me to figure in the waking state though I hunch each shoulder and wait for a confirmation that does not come. I suppose which arm is arbitrary in a dance left forty years? Forty years wandering in the wilderness, the cast comes off, a cloud moves, but I keep guarding the weak bone, the soft flesh, the other dreams still lost in a mist of darkness.

I am mad at my dog for stealing them from me. Am ashamed there are parts of me looking forward to the day when he no longer wakes me with his congestive heart failing coughs and pitiful whining for pee breaks due to the white diuretics I slip into burger-balls for him each early eve.

I see and feel my little girl, standing stiff and cold in her yellow-thin Hawaiian shirt, arms held out like ruffled wings, bronze-bow backwards and behind, ready to fight, her fear brittle and loud as grasshopper wings, but no voice, no scream, only brown-tar tobacco juice foaming at the mouth.

Sound only from the held out wounds, arms without drapes, legs without drapes, a stance for private that had been stripped away, the stink beetle shields with rump in the air, a spider plays dead even while poked with a stick.

A child’s defense in giving nature announces, “Whoever wants to tear me can!”

Have me because the all-knowing, fat mother selves, fashioned after my own don’t yet believe, force me into schools to work, take on boyfriends who carefully rip my heart, from magazine images to be pasted as a scrap, modge-podge and fringed edges, isolated from the picture of waterfalls and Arizona Highways, a hummingbird heart, me being a good girl to keep the knives at my throat. Wanting to bow, to kowtow, and still the pretty little face is hated for having been so open, challenging the ugly of crossed eyes.

Photo Credit: Ian Dooley/unsplash