It does not grow.
Outside I bloom, though love’s tendrils may slither and
Cradle the bars of this fortress with pale conviction,
Smooth and sly as burglars.

Only inside do the piercing blue eyes affect
(The shapely and substantiated grip of smooth hands
Can only be felt here).
In secret and in solitude, this cage where feeling is concealed
The butterflies and heart flutters
Hide here,

Ashamed. These are the guarded memories
Of pleasure and of ecstasy and moans,
Moans from muted lips because this is a silent fortress of hidden things and
Hidden is the vulnerability of one like me.
Secrets of silent lips framed in o’s

Tearing sometimes a hole. That hurting
Sense of completeness when held close against your chest,
When love is not love which alters where I used to stand.
And where,

I am trying to stand. Though I waver, wind-blown
Little wind-blown me,
Rigidly swaying and no longer a woman as the tendrils win and the fortress opens
Swaying with finally truths

Escaping through blood-red o’s.
Convictions and whispering
The antiquities of womanhood, the lesser and fairer,

The original sin.
Soft skinned vessels of creation and existence
The desirability of my skin is also hidden here, cradled

Between memories and lusts.
This fortress knows I am a woman outside,
That my femininity is not traditional

But I tried I tried to stop them
From slipping slowly out of my being. The tendrils.

I feel ashamed about the butterflies.

Flying softly, piercing blue
And shapely
Eyes and hands and you

My name is Laura. I feel so constricted by it. Laura. It sounds unnatural coming off of my tongue, like a foreign word that I am not used to saying, that I cannot pronounce properly. Why is that? It’s my name, I write it on at least four pieces of paper every single week day and I type it into countless things even more often than that. But I never stop to think: I am called Laura. Who decided that? My parents did, even before I was born. Laura Mars would be the name of their unborn child. I never got a choice, but it is not that which bothers me. It is the infinite knowledge that this will be my name for the rest of my life. That, even when I’m a grey-haired old woman, people will call me Laura. Will I be the same Laura I am now? How does one name fit a single, changing person for their entire life? This name is one which I grew into, not one that grew into me.

I think of how I named my little sister Maya before even knowing who she was, before even seeing her with my own eyes. I stared at the swollen body of my mother and tried to understand that there was a baby there and that she would be a girl, and I decided her name would be Maya. Did I do her wrong? Will she, too, grow up as I have and not understand her own name, the one I gave her before she could make sounds or breathe air or see the world? I think of how easy it is to hear my name from the mouths of friends and family and teachers and strangers. How come it feels like a strange idiosyncrasy, an unfamiliarity, when I say it myself? It is what I have known longer than I have known most things. Since birth, it is what I have been addressed as. The Serbian La-ooh-ra with the sharp, rolled r; and the English Loh-ruh, with a closed O and stressed uh. Neither of these pronunciations feel right, and neither make my name feel less foreign to me.

our disease clutches at the frowning clouds
hoping to infect
but the sly clouds slip away
out of the strato tropo
meso exo thermo
they raise imaginary arms
escape, escape, escape
leaving us, the lesser beings
to melt, blacken, erode
our divets diseased in consquence
we are nothing, we are nothing

age that sly creature
creases and blots that soft skin
the wrinkled page
of the waning story
coffee stains and crumpled blouses, age

kisses and hides your pupils
under skin streaked with blue
so the whites of your eyes vanish
so triples disappear and greens darken to black
so you sink into sleep

the sun was beating down and the old woman began to feel very thirsty. she reached a little cafe on the corner of a deserted street and sat down, her plant in the seat across from her. she neither spoke nor read english, merely pointed at the man sitting across from her drinking lemonade. the waitress understood and in a few minutes her thirst was quenched. then in her own language she spoke to the plant. she talked about time. the plant did not know how to speak but it understood as it was fluent in thirty four languages and keen to hear stories of the old woman’s interesting past. but the woman did not mention her past. she merely spoke of time. it frightened her how with every jingle of her wrist a few seconds went by and her remaining seconds were numbered. the plant felt sad because it knew it would die when she did. the plant realized that the old woman was lonely, and the stress of not being able to speak caused it’s leaves to droop sadly. the woman spoke quieter still, she was afraid her independence was waning, that she would soon need help with day to day activities. her feet were sore but she didn’t like to wear shoes, her callused heels used to the cement but her arthritis was acting up.

clouds covered the sun as it began to descend in the shimmering sky, a canvas of gold blue and grey. the woman said she smelled rain and it was time to go. the young couple beside her headed for the gym and the woman wondered about urbanization and how a room full of excersize contraptions was more appealing than a walk around the city. she picked up the plant and headed home, turned the key to her apartment building and slowly walked up the flight of stairs. it took her a long time as she was still telling the plant about the joys of the country she missed. the plant could relate because it grew up in the country and it too felt as though it was wasting away among cement skyscrapers, cellphones and discarded cigarette butts. the plant wondered where the woman’s family were and as they walked through the door it looked around for framed photos but the walls were bare. the floors and counters were bare apart from an empty water glass and a little bed. the woman placed the plant beside the windowsill and washed her hands in the kitchen sink. the plant did not find the smell of soap appealing and felt a little bit disoriented. the woman scrubbed her hands until they were raw and red and then she sat on the edge of the bed and look out the window and began to speak again.

i feel tired, she said. tired of moving of walking and of thinking. she said the fatigue had sunken into her bones and she carried it like a weight she could never get rid of. all the sleep in the world could not ease the weight, and with each passing day it grew heavier, weighing on her eyelids. she said they did not want to stay open. upon hearing this the plant felt the weight and drooped further still. the woman’s papery dark skin looked stretched over her cheekbones yet it sagged under her chin and her dark eyes were foggy and bloodshot. there was a large scar on her upper arm, as though a chunk of skin had been ripped off, and another that matched the first was on her right calf. the plant thought of fire and drooped lower, feeling the pain of the woman’s old burns. she spoke of tall grass and the wild strawberries she used to eat every morning, the hollow tree she used to hide in. no apartment could ever replace that tree and she wished she could go home and sit in it once more. the plant wanted to see the tree and the strawberries and burned with curiosity to hear more about the old womans life.

that night there was a storm and the woman felt the building sway with the winds and spoke out loud, she wished for her little wooden house in the country where she grew up. she fingered the little scar on her shoulder where a wasp had stung her when she was fifteen. she closed her eyes and both her and the plant thought they could smell the strawberries and could hear the tall grass swishing in the rhythm of the river and her wrists and her heartbeat. but suddenly the rhythm began to get faster and faster and it could not be controlled. the woman cried in anguish and the plant was drooping so low to the soil in the pot that it was almost laying flat on it.

suddenly a stillness filled the room as the storm was over and the leaves of the plant wilted beside the windowsill and the rhythm was lost in wrists which no longer jingled and hearts which no longer beat.

you told me to take these dry eyes off, and
find my instinct without their mask
so if i should
slip upon the eyes you made me leave behind
know that i let you take my
instinct words sight
and my shivering heart, let you lock them
in your lips, watch them with your warm brown eyes
your chapsticked lips
but mine still bleed and crack
on days like this

The scent’s beauty died just as yours did. Twenty three years of a boring desk job, an hour and a half away from your one bedroom apartment. Twenty three years of raising your children and working a dead-end job. In these years you lost all faith you had in men, your family, and yourself. You lost your faith in me as well.
You spent those first nights singing empty lullabies in a broken down trailer that was your home for a year after your husband left you pregnant and poverty-stricken. Your firstborn son watched his baby sister come into the world one cold winter night in 1986. That night you realized your position and your vulnerability. You lived with our parents for a few years, until you landed a filing job at a local telephone company.

Your older sister stopped speaking to you one day. The regret and guilt of leaving you alone is an ink stain upon the pages of my life. It leaks more every day, and one day it will cover me so entirely I will have no way to escape it.

I wrote you many letters, but they all went unsent. Instead they stayed instead in a disordered drawer, locked by a key I wore on a worn blue lanyard around my neck. Under all my clothes it always sat there, telling me that there was still a chance to fix this. Telling myself that lie to procrastinate fixing the worst mistake I ever made.

There is no chance. Nothing to be fixed. I found you today, blood spattered all over the front window of your old station wagon. I saw the wrinkles in your face, the grey in your hair. Your neck was broken, your head slumped to the side, unsupported. I lifted you out of the vehicle and held onto your worn and blistered hand as your breathing turned shallow and your lips blue. As the ambulance piled you into the stretcher headed towards the morgue, I held your hand. I took the lanyard and put it around your neck and closed your eyes shut when your breathing stopped, still gripping your left hand. I did not let go until my husband pried your hands from my iron grasp. I was not aware. By that time the entire world seemed so futile, my existence meaningless.

I left him and ran all around the world searching for redemption, a way to escape the ink stain that has spread like a wildfire since you died.

I realized the sin was too deep. I see your face constantly. It is etched into my eyelids like the flower patterns on my old china. Your children don’t know me, nor are they children any longer. Your daughter is twenty three now, and your son is twenty five.

Your face fills my irises even when I dream.  Maybe that is how you visit me, your way of communication.  In my dreams you wear dresses like the ones our mother wore when she was young and beautiful, flowered and loose and flowing with the wind.  The skin on your face is smooth yet your eyes crinkle when you flash your teeth in grins that soften your gaze as well as your aura.

The dreams are all I have left, but one day I will meet you again. We will smell the rain as it hits the warm pavement and think of our childhood and hold hands as the sun downs and we fly away like the seagulls during rush hour.