How To Feel When Your House Burns Down
How to Feel When Your House Burns Down
The home you are raised in is a mother tongue.
I was four when it was built, an age when innocence
turns river water and all that lives within to blood.
First birthdays and first dances fortify the mantel.
This home transports milestones, our own vessel
to move us from sidewalk chalk to the attempt to outrun
the stagnancy found only in the debilitation of the long run.
At seven, I held him in my arms and love upon my tongue.
Promises danced on my lips and ran rampant on my vessels.
College funds started in a baby bottle, tiny wishes held in a cent.
I remember grappling with his growth, attempting to mantle
the affinity we pinky promised deep into our own blood.
At twelve, my father taught me to dance in the blood
and glass on the hardwood. Still, I watch his fingers run
to sow flowers in my mother's hair, her back, mantling,
the image of infatuation, true love, in our minds. A tongue
of tenderness has our childlike innocence
giggling and shouting at the inamoratas and the vessel
of devotion in which each of us was vesselled
into this life. Each of us was born in the fervor of blood,
so sweet. My mother threaded honey, burned incense,
and chewed lemon slices whole to hold us near. She ran
baths of salts and oils, to cleanse the ever growing tongue
of infernos that caressed, more captivated, our mantel
of consciousness. For many years, we tied sheets to mantels.
With pillows and blankets, we’d build ourselves a vessel
to a land of fairies and warriors who shared the same tongue.
Pool noodles became swords. Here we spilled blood,
convincing ourselves if we were to sprint, leap, run
fast enough we too could fly amongst the rest, innocent
to the world around us. At nineteen, I watch the innocence
leave our home. Adolescent memories that kiss the mantel
turn to sharp licks in the wild fire that is running
through the bones of our sweltering home, the vessel
of affinities, dances, compassion, imagination, and the blood
that connects it all, now lapped up with tongues,
too heavy for the innocent, a cancerous burn in our vessels.
The mantle of snow is no relief to the flames that drip like blood.
And still, we do not run, we wait for the final lick of a mother's tongue.
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