If a Body Catch a Body

If my husband’s head were a suitcase I’d put it on the front porch and phone Good Will, storehouse of all second-hand goods and include my blue dancing shoes with heels in want of repair. I don’t need them to dance alone in my living room with the curtains drawn to Hitsville U.K., to Fisherman’s Blues, to Ode to Joy like a trash-can ballerina all thump of toes on hardwood floor and limbs akimbo.

If my son were a cradle I’d rock him sweetly, but he’s almost seven and rockets past in a blur, like an arrow, he cannot return to the quiver. He is green feathers in flight. I mimic his movement and keep going.  On the sidewalk a stiff leather suitcase that once held everything, now grown too small for dreams, seashells, cocktail dresses, poems, volumes of journals, and the torn pages of love stories. The monogram is no longer legible.

If my mother were a Madonna lily I’d plant her by the roadside and watch as she multiplied. A hundred bouncing white heads, I’d listen to their tsk-tsk on the wind, shaking in rage, in disapproval, in joy, as they reconstructed my life to the hummingbirds and bees. In this version I’m the perfect daughter. I put on pale blue gardening gloves and grab silver shears to trim all the pretty lilies, plunge them in a Baccarat vase where they are quiet and still, I watch their beauty fade, helpless as each day they die a little.

If my alcoholic brother were a bottle of fine merlot I’d drink him until my teeth purpled like the bruise he received in his first fight, the last time a mark was left on him. The next boy’s arm broke easily, like a branch he snapped for kindling on a family camping trip. To escape his campfire splutterings I enter the feather womb of my sleeping bag. The next morning I wake to find him with his feet poking outside his car, motor running, the heat left on full blast, his tent a deflated balloon.

If I were a Phoebus butterfly in this poem I’d be a cliche, flying without direction, just letting the wind have its way with me. I’d say, take me to the rainforests of Brazil but the wind wouldn’t listen, would only say “shh, shh” . . .my iridescent wings would shine rainbows, another cliche, like stripes from a cat-o-nine tails healing in multi-colors. But I am not a Phoebus, I am the poet hiding in this poem on a zipline through the dense canopy of these words, like trees, something like life.

Originally published in the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal

© Maria Garcia Teutsch