Mom,
when I was little
your fingers

reminded me of spider legs
making sounds like
doo dooo do do dooo do,

galumphing,
doing the hustle on the keyboard
for hundreds of pages

in Word.
Sometimes I wished
I were the pixels

in your computer so I could be
twisted
into words and phrases

and works of art,
some squiggly-scribbled contour of
the moment by the river, the

emptiness
where a face should be,
or an iris should be.

The poem and I
would become
indistinguishable

and people would search for
meaning,
finding questions where

answers should be,
and I would fear no one,
not even the Black Warrior

could erase me.
No earthly words
could describe the sensation:

worlds away from myself as
the artist’s masterwork, born
again and again in different times…