For Jackie

Tonight, she will sleep to climb
the stairs again.
Long brown hair falling down
her back as she runs up.
The boys are behind
her always,
long snakes winding
against and along the walls.
The door closes quickly;
she has gone in,
a snap of light
whipping across her face
before it’s sharp black and
they’ve gone in, too.

He was smashing,
she thought, and still,
every night,
there he is, smashing
into her across broken bottles,
her long brown hair
stuck to the liquid
pooling there.

Wishing to fall through
the floor but only going up,
always, always,
carried on snakes,
she glides up those stairs.
This dream is her broken record,
and she keeps breaking. 

Black & white & translucent,
the opposites of you once
rolled through the binders
lining my shelves.
Negatives.

I used to take your picture
so that I could keep you.
Now, the curling streams
of images spread themselves
out on your floor
beneath your dry hands,
catching with paper cuts--
you’ve taken you back.

Still I’ll remember how
you once gave me the pleasure;
looked into the lens,
eyes wide,
allowing me yourself
in the only way you knew
I knew how.

Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you
from the top of the Blue Ridge
near 20 miles away, I would stand
between two peaks,
sun rising,
looking out and down

Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you
and I would shut my eyes,
two half-moons
blocking sunlight
like the mountains,
wind lifting my hair,
sprawling my hands out into
it, listening

Oh Shenandoah, it’s far I wander
always, there are things
in the way of light--
but still I dream that
I could stand up
high, feeling,
breath catching on

Oh Shenandoah,
away, we’re bound away.

The white tulle circling my waist
keeps me caught here, in this in between,
a nearly empty drink clutched in my left hand.
A new one is poured and in a moment
I am young again, suddenly back
at
          my first ballet recital:
tutu wider than I am tall,
hands resting on
the sheer size of it,
red cheeks
pinched with happiness
          
         or Halloween, age 8:
the skirted mermaid’s tail
my mother had sewn for me,
the felt scales of it
beneath my tiny hands,
the glitter on my eyes
too heavy

          or that family vacation:
the Maui sun setting behind me,
dancing on the beach with
my hands in the long plastic grass
that trailed from my
narrow hips,
the real flowers
around my neck slowly dying,
the adults looking on.

We are not those with
frames of pictures that
line the windowsills.
At night our string lights
hang themselves between the scribbles
and figures we’ve sprayed
onto the walls in place of
the portraits our parents
would put there.
The windowsills are empty
but for our spray cans--
we are not those who
appreciate the ordinary.