What Happens When the Screen Door Breaks

Our screen door tasted salty and gritty. Sort of like tortilla chips if you rolled them in the dirt. It was an old screen door, and the screen…you weren’t sure if it was metal or not. It had so been coated by the years that whatever it was, you couldn’t tell if it was organic or rust.

Our screen door was neat because if you lay on the floor in the afternoon, the sun would come through it just over the neighbor’s roof, and the screen would cast its shadow all over you like netting, and it looked like you could rub your hands over yourself and feel the screen lines like fine threads across your skin. Your legs look like they are wearing stockings, though at the time you only know you like the way they look.

Sometimes the screen door didn’t close all the way, and a fly would get inside the house. That wasn’t usually a reason to get hit, though it happened sometimes. The yelling, though. The force of the anger, it’s silly…nothing hits you, but any second you feel something could whip from nowhere like a newspaper and snuff you out. Usually, it was just yelling, but it was enough for wanting to hide in the backyard that night.

No, what happens when the screen door breaks is what happens when you‘ve done something really, really bad. That’s when your mother tells you she’s calling the Manson family to come and take you away. That’s when she tells you she’s talking to your father, and you know that no matter what you do for the rest of the day, when your father comes home you are going to cry and scream and most likely bleed.

That’s when you spend the rest of the afternoon looking at a hole you poked in the screen, and a small part of you wishes it could be like a fly, escaping and going free. But most of you languishes in the doorway, low on the floor where the neighborhood kids can’t see you, letting the shadows creep over your body, licking the screen like you will one day a lover, tasting the salt and grit spread like safety over your tongue.

i want to dance like gene kelly.
i want to run like kathy freeman.
i want to believe like muhammad ali.
i want to write like walt whitman.
i want to walk like maria callas.
i want to be touched like joan of arc.
i want to sing like freddie mercury.
i want to style like audrey hepburn.
i want a closet filled with winona ryder’s old clothes.
i want to walk down the street without having to choose a side.
i want to spend afternoons with lavender and stainless steel.
i want my wants to be the pearls i can wear in broad daylight.
i want to dig up roads that have gone nowhere
            and plant flowers around the bones i find.
i want to rest my head in the silent earth
            grateful for each minute i can hear myself cry.
i want to read every book i’ve read again and again
            to buy a loaf of bread and feed it to hungry ducks.
i want to know there’s still room for my story
            even though most of it is just beginning.
i want friends as easy as old pajamas.
i want you to get lost in my eyes.
i want a world where i am safe when i sleep.
i want a world where i am beautiful
           where beauty is a window, wide and open.

What She Was, Wasn’t

What she was, wasn’t, how she
looked, sideways, into
arrhythmia, black eye black
from impact, from
gravity, sideways,
the way villains look, the way
children look, the way
Copernicus averted his gaze
and discerned the faintest star.

Sideways, the way destinies
like stars become unveiled,
in the tears that line the
bar, constellations within
constellations, drops refracting
light like tiny oceans,
a shower then, of meteors, moving

us the way we animate old clothes, give
meaning to the fat girl
without a telephone to steady her hand. Whispers

keep the swelling down, the discoloration, the way
purple and red web the nebula between what is opened and closed, spread
and torn, unraveled and dragged through a novel
no one bothers to read.

Sideways. In the backalley
hollow, the way night
clicks like the sound of
sensible heels clicking
in the hospital’s linoleum halls
wheels on pushcarts
stainless steel stained
with all that is organic, some rising, some setting, some
motionless, some
peering out the corners
of their eyes.

Walk

With me along the boulevard
where the stoplight genuflects,
where the school bus goes
somewhere other
than where we are certain
it goes.

If you were awake
we’d be touching
each other’s childhood, tracing
what the other has lost
as the sidewalk in June
has lost the touch of rain. Oh

but you are sleeping,
even now, in another
city, sleeping, and I’ve learned
why lovers often wait
like telephones, dreaming
even now, that they are talking
about the weather,
or a new song, dreaming
of a time even
to say nothing but I think
you are beautiful.