Dedicated to my husband, James Brown MD
From the book, Bleeding Fire! Tap the Eternal Spring of Regenerative Light
Dissonance of Memory
Did you forget how it was
before the Big Bang of matrimony?
How we were sitting apart from ourselves
like two stubborn suburbs
protesting like angry skunks
wishing some biblical flora
would save us from the surge of Eden
Did you forget how you found me?
I was flatter than a single dimension
my palate was an old wall
from an old house layered
with stories of color
Did you forget I transcended your body
like a shower curtain?
stepped past your invisible iron blockade
to pick fears of gangrene like lint
camouflaged them in my raspberry picking basket
and buried them with the curling
fertilizer of family skeletons
Did you forget
the six little opinions that fell
from our mouths full of cinder?
at the same time
in the same manner
We trance walked
burning wicks for nine hours down the boulevard
over the soiled footprints of “I love you”
until the moon grieved mercy
and bowed to release us
and the sparrows
flew calypso formation to salute us
Did you forget how the tones from
your mahogany-stained music lent the
last bit of image
to a desperate planet?
Dessert and sky I drank with raw flames
Oh my sire, my puppeteer
my marionette, my appendage
my soulful isomer reflecting
a beating aorta in the
corner of a condemned apartment
From the promise of Victoria Fall’s renaming
I am the standing lesser daughter of the wind
I have swallowed your eclipses
In me gestates a simmering
