You are the sea of a rich woman’s body,

Laced with pearls and a frothy lace,

Rimming your overfed neck, complete

With rolls, waves, and tide pools

Filled with jewels and gold. Rich.

 

You are this bad room, with its painted over

Jesus, its scrawled misery, its tack punctured

Atonements on the inside of this purple closet

Door. It’s confessional booth, its electrical box,

Its memories and its rigid, unbalanced, awkward

Growing up.

 

You are my sweet, sweet memory,

Clingy and wet like cheap lip gloss,

Lipstick melted in your pocket, a rosy

Bleed on the front of your pants that smells

Oddly, like chalk, like your teacher’s perfume,

Like your purse and you.

 

You are an inspiration grown stale,

A loaf of bread, clean, but stiff and chewy,

Your flavor gone, saturated by pockets of

Sourness. A toaster could do justice, if you

Needed the heat, but you don’t.

 

You are the grease, the oil, the animal fat

Dripping hot, scalding, choking, into

That old tin can that used to full of

Tuna fish, chicken of the sea, dolphin?

 

You are a prospect of perfection,

An American Dream so real you’d pay people to

Tell you you’re wrong, you’re right, or that a

Cigarette won’t kill you, but it will, and you’ll love it.

 

You are a dozen hundred clay elephant figurines

In this mini-valley filled with tires and tea kettles.

A glass of half sipped ginger ale on the arm

Of this rotting lawn chair. Your as clear as a bell

Drowning in the fog on this muted window.

 

You’re a group of people with no faces,

You make the sun go up and down,

The tides ebb and flow, the moon wax and wane.

A perfect circle, a rim without salt, alcohol

With no rubbing, infection without disease.

Grey as sea glass, unclear as nothing.