She has faux red hair
I can see the mud brown roots
A fur lined grime lined coat
The surreal turquoise of her too short top
Reminds me of precious Navajo stones
She’s too skinny
Plateau of a stomach, Stick arms with barely a crest
If she turned to the side
There’d be nothing at all

~

On her right shoulder blade
There is an angry scar
From when she and her sister had that fight
Violence was an eager thing in their house growing up
Anger fizzling up beneath the surface of her skin
An ubiquitous layer of odium between skin and muscle
For her family, fighting was nothing personal
Just a temporary catholicon for the itch
At first, it was a routine thunderclap of words
Echoing from each of their skies
She remembered watching her sister’s eyes, usually clear as a desert sky after rain, glaze over
She remembered her staggering slowly, cooking knife in hand
It was still dripping with the juice of the watermelon from the scraggly patch in the back
She remembered the eerie quiet
And how calm she became
Examining the small cut on the back her hand
She received it wrestling the melon from its botanical gulag
At the flash of the knife overhead, she spun around, feeling the caustic sting from the demilune wound
She twisted it from her sister’s grip and they both sagged over, panting
As dust motes bobbed by in a lackadaisical dansant

~
She had children
She tried hard to love them
But found them too alien
Vessels brimming with expectancy, potential, alacrity
Feelings lost in the annals of her labyrinth
She cried when the woman in the ironed black suit came to take them away
“Off to a better home.”
Oh, she cried
But she wasn’t surprised
And wasn’t sorry

~
She is a thing rusted on the inside

~
She had liked him at first
He was tall
And his eyes had a way of settling on things
On the dashboard, on the beer can, on the lighter
On her mouth as she chewed
He introduced her as his best girl
She’d never been best at anything before
And he was a big guy
The muscles flowing down his arms reminded her something between stones by the river and the knots in an old tree
But there was something wrong
A nagging presence
She could quiet it with enough to drink or smoke
But in the lonely hours of sobriety, it was like a heavy blanket in summer
Only when he drove her out to the bluff
Where there was no one around for miles
Did she realize that he had the same smell as her father
That stale smell of choleric despondency
But by then it was too late

~
Sitting in her car on 2nd street, she’s cold
The AC doesn’t work, never did
She rubs the penny in her pocket
The copper warmth thawing her thumb
She rubs it faster and faster until it burns
And then she imagines a thousand pennies
Spread evenly on top of her
Burning little holes
Until nothing was left but a velvety pile of ashes

~
Packing her ashes back into the urn of her soul,
She sighs, stretches her leg taunt on the clutch
And drives back where she always starts