Wind Chimes
Or, How Your Body Holds You Back and Forth
It came from a girl named Summer and brought me back to California,
my chest thumping in the kitchen where two edges of a countertop
a color I can’t name beyond the stains and bloated milk jugs sitting in their sweating become soft under my spine. I am nine or fifteen or maybe
it doesn’t matter
who’s to blame or how it ends
there go the wind chimes.
What remains, how did I carry out
the muffled thud of liquid slosh in plastic as it hit the wall behind my four-foot-something figure growing hot,
its insides leaking into braided tissue, stretching out and going stiff,
a child under covers. My ears hear the same
slurs and sounds we never talked about expand and fold in on themselves the same
as you do, I know
the tantrum-prone twelve-year-old, sad classical bluebird, I know
your mold. I am
with Mom’s thin, veiny hands, I am
putting you to bed now, a baby, still,
all of us are here.
In my shoulders are a cardboard box that held a schnauzer’s body, pilling ripped up arms of couches, too much texting, fast-food wrappers,
a slap that only I remember, incorrect answers and absence, my neck stiffens
in a sea of broken mirror pieces, my head spills onto the floor of my childhood bedroom where I lie beside an adult-sized chair
I flipped myself as I cry wolf and cut my teeth
back bending, belly heaving, not yet
bone diseased six months asleep on the pull-out bed stuck
in one still wet still-life painting.
A red balloon hangs in the middle of the room.
A linoleum floor that isn’t there anymore (stripped to fill some coastal landfill before my parents left the house, after I moved out;
the hardwood hurt my skeleton
it was so healthy)
where bread was broken, ribs were cracked, I watched Dad’s car roll up at twilight many nights,
glows like a midday lake. Scales of hot white
noise lap at the edges, softening and only ever-softer
impressions of light fade and reappear faster than the mind can capture.
The chimes sing resonant hollowness.
I am an audience to air, skin-tingling metal cold
cells turn over. The sun sweeps in and holds
particles of constellating dust in line
undiscerning minutes with years of past breakfasts and past flesh
as currents change
the surface of the earth,
rearrange my feet, milk-colored rays swaying in place.
The balloon expands and so makes itself shrink and
this is how you pass into my body.
Years ago and years from now, I hear a wind chime
and the curtain holds itself open.
