and my stomach feels queasy
as I eat my eggs
and process you.
Digesting the news,
it's not me,
it's true.
We talk like women,
pissed at the system.
Strong in our sadness
we laugh about the naked chicken
in the window across from Hello Darling!
and talk loud about the lack of female orgasm -
an epidemic
not aired on the news,
in case you haven't heard of it.
I feel the city come into me
as I leave it.
I had once breathed it in
as portals of streetcars rocked me.
Now trains swaying my aching a little more gently
and Sufjan reminding me "we're all gonna die."
I drink coffee in Riverdale,
the place that conceived
a quarter of me.
It's all news to me, this family history.
These streets of memory,
our mysteries humming as ghosts and power lines.
Fuck you and your feelings for me.
Fuck my grace and understanding.
You tell me you liked the memories
we made the same sentence you said we had to stop making them.
Why should a filmmaker stop filming or a poet stop poeting?
We're good at it - memory making - so why should we stop
and start remembering?
I am a woman who is a bit bitter,
and I know I'm not the first.
You sang me goodbye
while I kissed your ear softly (in my head)
and took in the moment while I was there on the couch
beside you, knees touching, hands resisting.
Her painting of the rocks
was about stability and fluidity.
Funny, I thought in the church pews,
that's what I had already written
about me and you when we watched the waves over the stone
from a cliff on our stomachs,
living on the edge.
We took pictures,
like her.
We were her painting in the present -
you are rock,
I am water,
and Grandma Gray painted it on paper
before I was born and I never knew her.
Life's a game of chance
and timing.
She was probably beautiful
but maybe annoying or stuck up or
maybe she snored too loudly,
and she'd have been concerned by my tattoo.
But I'll never know,
and now I'm moving to her home,
where she learned love.
Love in my stomach,
might puke it up.
Gin in my veins,
dreams on my sleeve,
ideas unborn on pages
with lavender tea,
home somewhere else.
But I feel it growing -
these hospitable humans making me swoon.
We are good.
Present/past/fluid/stable,
I'm ready for mine -
in the city of trees,
in the wild,
with the lights.
And I miss you.
Mom passed me Aunt Olive's inheritance
tears in her eyes,
another stranger's kindness.
I pass out my Body of Work in secret,
relieved to be rid of him and by the kindness in your lens,
even though
you have a woman in each eye
and when you blink
I am gone -
but don't you worry I'll take care of my own.
And you know, I'd still paddle the river with you
if you were alone,
and wanted my company -
if I'm not off and hitched by then.
We could spoon and wish on stars,
play would you rather
and have serious conversations.
I was gonna buy you a record,
but I didn't.
I bought myself fancy cocktails with
the ladies instead, with colouring pages and names of dishes we had to Google.
cuz we're adults and that's what women do.
You didn't choose me and my laughter,
and I buy myself fancy cocktails with the ladies instead.
