The day I was born, slipping wide eyed and shocked into this world, I was pissed as all babies are. I was pissed to be pulled so rudely from the red velvet room of my mother's body and tired from the endless smashing journey of the birth canal and I squawked and I squarreled my rage and disapproval. Fortunately, though undeserving as I was so freshly made, I was born to a woman whose face was so beautiful that peace overtook me and I quickly found this world to my liking. My mother's face was my first sunrise.
I learned that day that though there will be pain and I will be bewildered and often angry, I could expect to find marvelous surprises that would soften the sharp of life outside. Smoked mullet was a revelation. A lemon wedge would blow my mind. A fondness for breasts would never leave me. A brother is a genius thing. There are books.
And so we are the same today as we are the day we are born, only not babies and therefore not as cute. Not babies and not as cute, but Mama stays the same. Her face, her arms, the tightly packed packages of her calves, her heartbeat, her life-giving bosoms. She turns and her smile is still the sun.
This crazy mad life, what a wonder I exist! I am an accident of bone! I am the only me there is! How absurd! How grand! All this and dancing too! and lace and cakes and slime and Edgar Degas who loved the ballerinas! All this created for me simply because my mother loves me so.

Time Out For Tears

I will be thirty-two come Monday. I suppose that makes sense. Monday is moon-day, Lunes, and I have been so mad and moonly lately. There is no help for it, I change with the tides.
I have been crying, and I will let myself cry. I am happy, really, to be here my thirty-two years. I am not where I thought I would be but I never had much of a plan to begin with so that is not the cause of my tears. Thoughts of success in life don't bother me none. When I am 102 and I pass in my sleep, or from a fall down the stairs after I've tripped over one of my many ornery cats, I only hope that they will say of me that I loved. That is success to me.
But here, on the day I was born, my Aunt Lynn took care of my brother and braided her long blond hair in two braids, because that is how my mother wore it and she wanted him to have something to hang onto. My Aunt Lynn, her name like a note, her face like the sun, is as much a part of my birth-day as I am and she is not here, and that makes me cry.
And then there is the oil pouring up from the earth and out into the Gulf of Mexico, which is an abstract thought now but soon will wash up into our reality. It is not the fact that something terrible and irreparable has happened to something so beautiful and vital to my world that hurts so much, it is that we stupid humans did it. We are all the time forever destroying the beautiful places, and so much life, for nothing. For money. For money, which is so insane it tears my brain. We made money up, it doesn't even exist. That makes me cry.
Another one, a conversation with my girl friends about how free we used to be (though one of us never was) and the cold walls we've built up to protect us from boys that hurt and boys that lie and boys that use and leave behind and they call us crazy but all we've done is try to love them as best we can. And now, the three of us so young and pretty and bewildered are afraid to trust. Me and my best girlfriends going home to empty beds, that makes me cry.
Really my tears make me cry. I just have a sad heart right now. But I love my heart, I wouldn't trade it for the world. I am so lucky that way.

My Lady Day

I know a girl who is sad but sad is not all she is she is quick to laughter. Her eyes that see so much and turn away from more fill and heavy with tears, her hands clutch thighs and then air and then thighs and I do not know her well, but I watch her.
She is worth watching. She is beautiful. I love to look at beautiful things so much, that I feel sorry for the most beautiful people because they cannot see the beauty that they are. They live inside their faces and their bodies and if they are the most beautiful thing in the room, they have a less beautiful room to look at. She is one of those, so pretty, yes. And yes. But she is also one who loves beauty, who knows its importance, how it is vital to a soul and beating heart. She gathers it around her, it follows her down street corners and into alleys and in and out of buildings. I brought her a gardenia and she put it in her hair and wore it all day long, even when it was done being creamy perfect loveliness, even when it hung its head, because the smell, the scent of lemonly honey still floated around her. She was her own garden today. She knows lovely is in the nose and in the hands just as well as lovely to the eyes. And oh she does love lovely.
She is a room with red curtains. She is a bath poured hot. She is a sip that burns. She is a ribbon on the ground.
And what I love about her is that she is real. She makes mistakes. She break a heart. She take your book. She make a joke. She dance like crazy. She sweat and smell. She will not trust but trust the wrong ones and in doing so she breaks her own heart. She is her own joke. She may fall and blush, and fear what people think. And right she is, I think, to fear what folks may say because folks tear down the pretty ones and god forbid you miss a step, oh they love it when you miss a step. Part of her thinks, I think, that when she falls or jokes fall flat or her too drunk just proves that she is not as fine as she could be. But it is her blush that makes her fine.
She sees too much and feels too much and takes that back inside and worries it worries it worries it. To get the answer out. To get the honest out, the real thing, the key. But she is not that serious. But yes she is. But she is both at once and that is the true thing.
I don't know why she compares herself with perfection except that we so many people do it. Once I said of myself that I knew that I was pretty, I was just not my taste, and perhaps that is how it is for her. I do not know, I don't watch her that closely. It's not my place. I admire her, that is all.