Resembling Flowers Resembling Weeds, and: Of Being Sick and Tired, and: The Thoroughbred, and: My Nothings

Resembling Flowers Resembling Weeds

I'm fourteen and the smell of singed haircircles me like the halo of a pre-RenaissanceMadonna. Loss already on my face.A summer crush holds out his fingers

for the other boys to smell. The next dayI choose a cute outfit: shorts with tinyrepeating flowers. I braid my hair

into a wreath of juniper and dandelion.There's an iteration of myself with gillsand fins who my twin brother knewas well as he knew himself, then

there's me with petals on my thighsand in my hair, flowers even inside.The untrained eye can mistake yarrow

for flower or blue-eyed grass for weed.Facing the mirror, irises grow wideacross the field of myself. They're so goodat making use of holes. I want to balance

pitchers of seawater on my head. I wantto be more like my eyes. I carry holesand purses and a picture of me, age six,

Easter bonnet tied under my chin, shinsgrazed by bluebells, a steeple I can hearbeyond the frame. An image I've only heldin another's retelling. The scentless

girl I was has a fragrance I recognizein the mirror. The girl and I bringour rose-perfumed wrists to the flesh

below the ears. Flesh that will one day be eatenbut not consumed. What is covered now by clothand petals will be taken wholly. A tongue,feeling like many, will coax woman out of us.

Of Being Sick and Tired

—After Pablo Neruda and Fannie Lou Hamer

I'm tired of being a woman. I walkinto grocery stores and laundromats wetwith the cracked face of a maidenheadlurching across the Atlantic.

I want to sleep like a seed in stony ground.I want the phone to stop biting my ear. I want to forgetthe bills and keep the lights on.

It so happens I'm tired of my boots and my wristsand my hair and my waist and my wombwith its weary flowers.

The smell of milk makes me gag. The sightof forsythia makes me moan out loud.I don't want so much repetition.

I don't want to go on being a limpsail, raised or lowered at whim, batteredand drenched, filled with what's invisible.I don't want to go on as a sail and a sieve.

That's why Sunday, when I wakewith my debutante face dusted with blushand it pushes me into bleak hotel rooms,into shopping malls bright as casinos,

into humid church pews, and into the backsof all things—there is salt everywhere: in the cupboard,

in my eye, on the sidewalk. I marchwith my signs, my coat, my hoarsesinging, remembering everything. I walk

through the bowels of the city, past endless windows,under marble arches, through a park with rocksscrawled by graffiti. Still, it would be lovely

to roam the streets with foam rollers pinned like carpto my netted hair. It would be great to rage.It would be marvelous to weep.

The Thoroughbred

There is, in a nearby field, a retired show horse living outwhatever days it can win, a white horse speckled with brownfecks. Its limp mane welcomes your hand. On its face,

in the corners of its eyes, a herd of flies gathers like a netcapturing the horse's head—darker than the spots on its coat,and moving. The flies won't leave for good because the horse

has no arms. I consider spending my life swatting fliesfrom the horse's head, which it moves from side to side. No, no,no, no. The horse twitches like a second hand ticks, then tremulous.

A clock doesn't know what time means. The horse has no wordsfor yesterday or tomorrow, no words like tear or tear, and ifthe horse's head, shaking left and right, isn't...