my bed.

you made your bed and now you have to lie in it, she tells me over the phone. it's like the bed is hell, or something.

my bed is a warm pillow i sink into, i say.

we'll see, she says, like her psychic eyes can see the hell that my bed will become. but, she doesn't believe in psychics. she believes in hell. and she believes that beds like mine eventually all go up in flame.

thin paper.

god feels nothing
like thin paper
to me.
god feels like
blankets from the
dryer and
bonfires in summer.
god feels nothing
like thin paper
to me.

before you get there.

after i lost my closest friend, i called my mother to cry. she sighed on the other side and said, i told you not to tell anyone. i told you this would happen. and like the child that i am, i cried some more and stopped calling her regularly.
still, she drove an hour in Michigan slush to buy me a rug and a chair and a lamp to fill the empty space that swallowed all of the warmth in the dorm room. and before she left, she told me, i hope you figure out where you're going before you get there.

how many versions.

sometimes i wake up crying from dreams when i can't draw the line between images formed during REM and real life. i have a reoccurring dream where i see a car crash into a tree. when i run up to the window and look in, the driver is my mother, unmoving, eyes open and staring at me with trails of blood from her temples. the first time i had this dream in middle school, i ran downstairs and into her bed and put my fingers to her wrist until i felt an even pulse. whenever she was running late, i saw flashes of her bloodied face in the dream and called her in a panic to make sure she was still alive.

some days i believe that dreams are actually just portals into other dimensions.

i wonder how many versions of my mother have died in this way. and i wonder how many versions of myself have driven her to choose crashing into a tree over praying for her daughter's soul.

worship.

i have practiced opening my hands to the spirit
and singing praises with my tongue.
i have glowed from the holy ghost
in churches with ceilings like attic spaces.

so maybe it was the walls of the room
slanted up like a steeple
or the blue moon coming in from the window
lighting us up like
angles still blazing from heaven,
but when you were hovering over me
and your skin was warm
i opened my hands
to the god above
and sang hallelujah into your mouth.

tubber ware.

back when she was younger and everything was still good between them, her mother baked nearly every cookie in her recipe book around christmas. she baked for her clients, her friends, and the majority of her extended family. the little girl would try each one of them except the ones she knew contained mint. to her, eating mint flavored things was like eating toothpaste. there were always at least two tubber wares full of cookies in the house for the two weeks before the 25^th.

when the little girl got bigger and went to college and started the painful process of becoming an adult, her family back in that old farm house dropped weight like bowling balls on a diet that entailed eating nothing but fruit one day and nothing but meat the next, and cut out all sugar. when she came back home on a school break, her mother was so skinny from the diet and so tan from the sun-therapy depression treatments that hair and clothing were the only indication of human life. and for the first time ever, there were no christmas cookies in tubber ware.

“things have changed around here,” she said, looking at her brother's slim face and loose pants, noticing the dog's crusted over eye and the way he no longer greeted her at the back door, but rather slept deafly on the couch and, like the rest of the family, looked up sleepily when she showed him she was home.