“It’s Always been Cheese”

In this dream I have Sinead O’Connor is gumming my kindergarten teacher Mrs. McCann’s 1994 over-perm

in what’s supposed to be Page Hilltop Elementary’s craft corner but is actually my grandmother’s bedroom vanity

their both naked

Signing the cross over a pair

of free standing breasts

Cooling in a bed pan

I can barely make out their

silhouettes now

Only the mountainous terrain

Of bodies merging

And Sinead’s distinct head-shape

Bobbing obscenely as she says “Canadian Clocks curb constant crime”

I nod furiously as if it were common knowledge

Mrs. McCann offers me a push pop

And a glass cigarette

The floor is a calico shag carpet

The floor is a conveyor belt

I am looking at the moon inside my mother

“It’s always been cheese,” she says

Pointing as it rolls out from between

Her thighs

until enough was enough

and enough was nothingness

Into nothingness And nothingness was:

too many nights amidst the sweet musk

of fruited smoke

Curling out in syllables

I had no language for--As if by incantation

Answered smoke with snake oil

But could not imitate the beautiful husky twang

of it

Of it

Exit.

I climb

the unnatural incline

Of my mother

towards the window

Where I might

have waltzed

in with the fog--

the room ‘s dark

and full of quiet hunger,

I drank from a spring

And knelt at the valley,

till i poured like daylight

from a jar

slow like molasses--

Before

I rise up and evaporate

my mother’s still counting

kernels

of teeth I left on the floor.