I’m playing in the park until the last peachy colors fade from the sky,
an endless sidewalk of chalk drawings, popsicle stains, and jump ropes--
a smattering of freckles across pale skin.

I’m the hum of jazz lulling me as the city lights blazed,
  spending hours in museums, finding secret worlds in glass cases--
the first time I spoke in a tongue my parents couldn’t comprehend.

I’m kissing cuts to take the pain away,
“You know you’re my favorite, right?”--
a kitchen filled with English toffee and flickering evergreen candles.

I’m the family dinners filled with shouts and wheezy laughter,
Bumpa and Grammie and Santa Claus--
reading until sleep filled my droopy eyes.

I’m searching for slithering snakes in the unruly grass of the farm,
an emerald sea of corn stalks, shimmering under the sun--
a sunburn blistering like bubble wrap.

I’m the tears down her cheeks when the cancer won,
crying in a cold classroom--
the scalding pain of flesh on a Harley’s metallic muffler.

I’m cutting fresh flowers to fill a home with sweet perfume,
my lips against her tissue paper skin, her dozing in my arms--
my mother telling me, “We love you, no matter what.”

I’m the home with an armor of roses enveloping its stony walls,
suppressed saline drops shed in international airport terminals--
black coffee as periwinkle and purple painted themselves a new day.