things I learned that summer

My mother would stand peering up at the canopy

worrying about the limbs reaching over the neighbor’s fence

The neighbor hates our splendid overgrowth?

I would ask my mother through the window

I would ask to paint my room pistachio

There were always words to paint what I dreamt in chalk rainbows on pavement

There were always apples on the kitchen counter below the window, opening

onto the backyard jungle of weeds that would creep up the siding

fill up the gutter, play with the neighborhood children, friends at eye level

There were always four leaf clovers sprouting when the grass went untended

and untethered, we would gather and pluck them for soup, stirring in ingredients

vibrant dandelion, wild green onions from someone’s tree lawn

I would imagine a real restaurant with real dinner guests

There were always trash bags full of hand-me-downs, scraps revitalized

reconfigured into Frankenstein dresses I would wear to a friend’s church

where angels’ voices would filter through stained glass

I would imagine an army of aphids crawling up the pews

as though the wood was still alive the way I was alive

Every street in the neighborhood was alive

its lush green cover ringing with cicadas calling for their mates

My feet slapping the sidewalk or the cold aisles of the supermarket

a zoo, where watermelon rind is its own animal, bulbous green zebra

There were always invisible wings on my back propelling me endlessly forward

I would ask for earrings, cicada shell jewels, then for the holes in my ears

to stop oozing reminders of my insides, an ocean in loose human casing

I would stare at my skin, turning green from fake silver

Sitting on the astroturf front steps illuminated by porch light and firefly

I would stare at strangers passing and imagine shifting into a new someone

My mother wanted someone

to cut the weeds in the backyard, the precarious branches

Someone to unclog the mossy bloated gutter artery

Someone to stand with her and watch me bloom beyond the kitchen window

Most of all, she wanted me

so much that she quit her job

went into labor when the world was silent, white

and from the hospital we emerged

into verdant Spring