Violet fancies whisk me away to a paradise of buttons and zippers. Imagine being able to hang into every good thing, tight fisted like a covetous toddler. Buttons are images of togetherness. My dress, the way it drapes over my body like a sheet hiding old furniture. This house is haunted by the ghost of fall. Zipper in Spanish is a beautiful word. My language doesn’t have a word for the feeling I’m surviving right now, but my blood pulses to the cadence of someone else’s imperial march. The Button Museum is in Connecticut, a short drive from the land of split seams and cruel themes.
Day: December 13, 2024
Flowers
Friendly flowers clamor
For my scantily clad attention
And my runaway money.
We bring corpses into the house
To freshen our rooms,
Our wounds,
Our wombs.
I press grass,
Leaves.
My leaving a black spatter on my mother’s door.
Flowers are gregarious narcissists.
My mother is a flower
I plucked from my rib cage.
See how the sun croaks her old song,
Raining dry energy and
Nefarious bruises on us all.
36
My biological clock is tangerine textured and linen flavored. It ticks almost cutely beneath the kitchen sink as images of Man and his daughters dissolve in a pan of citrasolv above. My clock, let’s call her Norina, is fashionably late. My eggs play badminton in my cramping womb, and I feel the children that could have been vaping in my chest. Norina knows she will end soon, an Armageddon all her own, her own chapter in my personal book of Revelation. The greatest gift in life is life, and Time is scooping it out of me like ice cream. I have so little to offer. I was built to be soil for a generation of redwoods. Instead I’ve become the grime at the bottom of an old casserole dish, growing age and disrespect.
Miniature Moon 