Sixth of June

I’ll keep going

Im more fragile than I was as a child

What slips into my head stings.

A memory of a painting with a lion in a bush on a peach wall.

Always a peach wall

And sometimes a peach hand reaches across the ether and wipes the side of my already rough cheek.

I wish I knew the language the peach is speaking

Is it peach or was it coral?

On the beach

I’m six. Lake Michigan is warm. It must be August.

I wonder who will carry me up the splintering wooden steps to the house.

My eyelids are stinging

Is it the sunscreen or the sand?

Or the chlorine?

We’re at the pool. My hand drags across aqua tile under water.

Mel has goggles on and her skin crinkles under the elastic band.

I laugh and get water in my lungs.

My lungs

Are they working?

I hear everyone around me take deep breaths through their nose, out through their mouth.

Should I do that?

I’m angry now.

I can’t get my arm into the sleeve of my jacket. My mom is tugging behind but I’m pulling forward.

Why am I so mad?

I’m still mad. I’m sitting at a sticky table in Manchester.

I want to bite into the soft wood.

I can float away at any moment. I struggle to get my arms around it all.

My wingspan is only so wide.

Jason tracks bird songs while we’re in Europe. I ask him to show me pictures of each bird.

Short and fat and cute.

Am I listening to the song?

What’s playing on the radio? What CD is in the player? Did my sister skip my favorite?

I grip her forearm as we laugh in the backseat of mom’s car.

Laugh laugh laugh.

It’s June again.

The sun is hot early in the day.

I burn laying in the grass dreaming of the next school year.

And I’m in the grass again now. My skin is itching.

There are Azalea bushes all around in Spain.

Or are they Bougainvillea?

Mom cuts the stems and puts them in a green vase on the kitchen window sill.

The peach hand pushes on the small of my back and tells me to keep going.

Should I keep going?

I should. It’s the 6th of June and I have no other choice but to keep going.

I’ll go and go and go.