My Soul as Roots and Branches
I.
The bird’s nest an impressive collection of sticks, cigarette butts, and one water-logged mask, straps swinging like college kids’ legs off the top floor of the parking garage. As a kid I heard, touch the eggs and you’ll make those birds into orphans. Even if you know the mother happened into one of your brother’s tragic accidents, you still left the babies alone. On the chance the father will come back.
II.
The railroad tie is no longer backbone to the matriarch of transportation. Its majesty reduced to rotting weather barriers in subsidized government housing. When the train was the pinnacle of technology, people who looked like me were driving nails deep into wooden flesh. Enough wood, nails, and blood to conjure someone into Asian Jesus, but my religious friend said it must be enough to know that Jesus was born closer to China than America. Before it was a railroad tie, it was a tree.
III.
Is my neighbor poor or does she dress poor? I don’t trust her dog. Or that haircut. Hello. Hello. It’s a greeting that kills. I am old enough to threaten her, to make her feel threatened, to feel threatened by any number of one syllable words she could scream. Nice dog, I say, though she’s already gone. There are enough acorns on the ground to make several squirrels into tycoons.
IV.
Cue the camera. It rolls at my bare feet, my bare knees, over my blurred-out genitals but catching my pubic hair, past a stomach wrinkled with lines from too much sitting, above a chest beyond its most attractive years, to the lips that move the lump in my throat. Three versions of the same story. Point the camera at my feet. Capture how they move.
