Reality is unbending over my eyelids.
The tides tattoo my ankles
and I close my eyes on the highway
so they can take the wheel
from the tremors of my grasp
and carry me home.
My recklessness is a child I hold by the hand
and lead through the thinning aisles
of the grocery store.
In the parking lot, I brush her greasy hair
and tell her fables of martyrs
and witches and wives.
I am old enough for them to burn me for a crowd.
Would they believe the contorted truth of me
if I stood before the court,
the solar flare across my sweatshirt
throbbing like a heart?
I have walked the circumference of two moons
in thousands of shoes —
platformed, flat and wide, studded with silver.
They are now in the donate bin
a closed-down thrift store
on the South Shore.
I could be the hyacinth girl, I tell myself, wet with rain.
I could be an iron dancer on a rusted weather vane.
No, name me Marigold
for the yellow-orange bloom
of my grandfather’s hair.
Oh, sweet nineteen — let me go, let me go.
Let me be old.
Let me be an old woman already, one who coats
her white in teal and pink, in a little house
on a limestone cliff, the bluster combing her out,
spreading her wide, dashing her
along the whitecaps like hopscotch.
Her cottage leaning over the cliff
on Mermaid Lane, oyster shuckings
littering the yard
like spent shell casings, stout towers
of rounded rocks lining the dirt path, a rusty bike
laced with greens propped against a walnut tree.
Call me Marigold in this place.