“If your house cleaning plan consists of you running around the house, dusting, wiping, mopping, swearing, washing, folding, rinsing, and so on and so on… you need to stop!  Stop and look around you… what do you see?” -- housecleaning-tips.com

Fourteen (14)
pink candles,
$5.38 a box
placed on a cake iced purple
little dancing plastic princesses on top,
their miniature gloved hands waving like tiny Miss Americas.
Plastic perfections to be packed in a box;
soon to be forgotten memories my daughter will want to keep.

Mangoes, peeled and diced. 
Packed in a brown paper bag;
for the children.
I draw a smile on the front of the bag in sharpie so
if you were to turn it all inside out
you could see faintly
the black ink bleeding through;
it doesn’t look so happy from behind and
the smell makes the fruit seem sour.

Soap.
Bottles of it,
jars,
blocks,
anything to clean away those dark stains on the carpet
from when the children decided to play hide and seek in the chimney,
so thrilled to have won
that they danced across the room, little footsteps creating a map of the moment,
tracing their paths from the short-lived victory
to when he realized it was time to push her down
because he told me it’s what he felt he was supposed to do.

Band-Aids,
because boys and girls are made for falling
and getting back up.

A department store dress that’s blue;
short,
but not so much that aging relatives pick fun.
A dress the color of the sky so that I could hide in it
and no one would come looking.

Dry cleaned grey suits
like tokens for a slot machine,
sometimes He’s so thankful He brushes my cheek with His mouth
and tries to form words,
but I think He’s forgotten my name.
And sometimes He’s so thankful He pats my hand
like He’s tipping a bus boy:
one good deed done for today.

Notebook paper.
I’m writing a novel.

Pencils,
lined up in a row, in my breast pocket
making tallies
jotting notes
appointments
reminders
sketches of my boy and girl making a sand castle.
I closed the book when the waves washed it away
because she started crying,
but he took her hand and told her to count her fingers
because as long as she had them, she had a way to make a new one.

A handful of dollar bills
with an orange paper clip holding them together;
the children are painting the walls of their rooms
and every hour they go,
I give them another dollar.
He is watching them work besides me.
When I lick my lips, He goes and gets me some lemonade
and when He sits comes back, I hand Him one of my dollars,
and I laugh,
but He just smiles and looks through my eyes sideways
and then to the sky out the window,
and I remember when I wanted to disappear in the clouds.
I wonder if He’d have found me hidden there.