Sketch for my newest drawing that I'm doing for this poem:
Could tell me it was untrue.
Some children are carried home
Eyes shut, little hands swaddled.
Some are placed down carefully,
wrapped in stories that almost fit.
Some wake up under a roof
that is kind, or trying to be,
but still feel the vibrations
change when they approach
like every room is asking,
how to sit still in a borrowed nest.
A little hollow made by a life;
that started long before me.
But love does not always erase
the strangeness of arrival.
Sometimes it only teaches you
How to leave is to leave sharp scars that never fade.
How sometimes you never see them
The hibiscus opened beside me
the kind of flower that makes memory
look sweeter than it was.
I remember cozy round chairs,
Big enough to swallow me.
I remember being small enough
to believe a flower could mean safety
just because it was beautiful
and came back every year.
I sipped fine honey wine.
that some dangers are inherited
by the ways adults disappear
without leaving the room.
could grow from the same dirt.
Or maybe it emptied because of me.
The egg left somewhere else.
The child raised by another mother.
The small body fed by a mouth
whether it wanted the trade.
Whether it ever looked down
holding my poison berries
that I had learned the language
One flower bloomed beside me.
And still I stayed there,
sorting out my little poisons;
Smokes, and powders, liquids, and herbs, plants, and fungi.
which one had been placed in my mouth
and which one I had chosen.
