I remember
When I was a child
My body an uncensored country
All it's fleshy fruits unripe
Beneath my wispy dresses

Mother would drive
Down the road to strange places
Always changing location
New faces opening between the trees
Tattoos crawling onto my planet
Permanent in my mind

And beyond a garden lay a house
With empty shutters and shallow sounds
Of breathing in between rainfalls
Sunlit creaks and stretch marks forming
Beneath the windowpanes
Wrinkled white paint attempting to laugh
Against the lavender blue flowers against their teeth
How I soaked in the scene
Our car molding it into a motion picture
Crawling up close to my vision
Blatant
Rising up in front
Were towers of stones
Stolen from their earth homes
And placed within a foreign element
Newly acquainted with sky

My mother would whisper
Voice soft and speculative
As if words were not enough
For ones such as these
She spun scripted tales of a woman
Growing rocks from her garden
And forcing them into orgy
Balanced and waiting on top of one another
For the climax of religion
To soak them into some new creation
To break them apart until all is well once more

My mouth would displace
Fascinated
Slippery with foamed thoughts of this creature
I imagined her with gravel fingerprints
Sorting through rocks like family photographs
Until they became bodies
Breasted and hipped
Shaken into a solid mass of quiet
Unmoving

If she were young:
Straw hat flopped over a darkened crown
Hem of her a white dress stained a dirty gray
Summer in the realm of cold
And holding onto one last hope
Compromised
Nothing but a bridesmaid in a wedding of dreams
Hiding away
But reaching her bouquets of rock between the barriers
Her own hands birthed in the womb of her palm

If she were old:
Tangled in between black houses
In pursuit of color
And dragging the gray across her lips
The cigarettes inside her apron
And the stones leaning on her porch
Protection from an outer world
The heirlooms of her womanhood
A witched tradition
Cancer in her lungs and blood

One day they disappeared
Empty
The circulation of air ceased
And skins of mountains scraped away

The world became a bit dim
A little too common

But perhaps phantoms will still resurrect
From beneath the paintings lain along the granite
A voice secure in mystery once more