The grifting dawn begs for someone to appreciate her slovenly humidity, but none of us have gils and we are tired of swimming through air so thick that you can hear the water say to it, “Damn, you’re fine!” Summer calls me from a landline and asks me to pick up a movie at Blockbuster, and tell her how the children are enjoying their candy cigarettes. The children bob up and down like balloons, high on the thrill of looking adult. Fall is more subdued. He will write to me with a quill pen and say he isn’t coming, Summer has Heaven’s big brass door locked. Then he comes quietly, all at once. The water rains down on rotting leaves and we celebrate our breath, the rattle of our arthritic bones just beginning to clang as Winter caresses the door handle with her bony white hand.

Construction paper everywhere. I feel the colors with my fingertips. A rainbow of raw, unfettered childishness and possibility. The garden of papers that was a rainy day recess in Connecticut necessity. I had castles in mind. Later on I would mug Baudelaire and I found the mechanism of “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” ticking away like a watch in his left pocket. On this day, though, raindrops trample over me. My glaring deficiency of virtue and economy are on a television for everyone to marvel at whether they want to or not. Some day in the not too distant past I will get up and turn it off. Fear is an organist playing “Bitch” by Meredith Brooks, over and over again in the corner.

A flower never taunts a bee. Digging ditches in the prison of my psyche I find a sapphire. Quickly I put it over my eyes and peer through it to see the underside of this gossiping world – the truth quilted and fluffed and made by needles and violence. Stretching toward the sun is a talent of plants. Stretching toward the moon the predilection of women. And men? The men tend bee hives into the horizon.

In a world of cherished pink and heavenly yellow, I come singing. But slowly softness begins to cling to me like my shadow. His hands titillate my nipples as I step out of the steaming, mysterious shower. When my bones move out of place, he gently refashions me like furniture. The air is as cool as silk, my dreams hot as rumor. My man, tall and stony, wraps me in velvet and lays me on a pillow of desire that melds to my body. Eventually it is as though I was always a cloud, beautiful, billowy, and threatening the earth with my crisp, glassy lightning.

Serendipitous clouds zipper the sky together, giving me celestial visions of a river, clear and lifeless, rowing its way to the bay I never returned from. The corset on my tongue is too tight. I must tell this story only with sentient and acceptable words. What if I told you there was a curse as old as the sea, and only a woman with a backbone of pearl can see the black shroud of the curse over other women’s heads? A woman is a swift and terrible thing. I am all dressed up in this blue sequin gown, and have nowhere to go. I need to be careful here. My corset is tightening. What I mean to say is the inglorious sunset and all the aquariums beneath was the real thing, and my best shot at something as furry as happiness.

My grandmother was a fish. Behind the iron bars of Memphis, she died slowly as my grandfather drained her blood to paint roses for his filthy lover. To me she was a wall made by the best mason, impossible to crack. Underneath, a heart poured out into a human sieve. The tragedy was she never said no. The bondage of the Southern Baptist woman, silent and sticky with secrets. She could have been in a condo in Florida with her little dog. Instead she swam in a tank in Memphis, her ocean of options breaking on someone else’s beach, and she dissipated into the vastness that is a God who sees every sacrifice.