Lily

14

when i was younger, my mother would drop me on
aunt eleanor’s doorstep, and depart with a dry kiss on the forehead and a
stern look at eleanor.
i would duck behind eleanor’s legs as we waved goodbye
to the angry growl of the 1956 mustang starting up,
and mother would drive to the rhythm of
so long, farewell
as she sped off onto the highway.
i never saw which way the car turned;
she would drive away so quickly that the wheels would kick up a
dust cloud bigger than the sun,
and one time i stood in the street, squinting, hoping to see mother
glance backwards to check that i was safe,
or even just a glimpse of the mustang’s red paint,
but i got dust in my mouth and for a second,
i thought it was cinnamon.

when i was younger,
i was a dandelion growing in a field of sunflowers,
and when i began to sprout, i touched my leaves with trembling fingers and cried,
afraid of myself and afraid to fall in love, because i knew
anyone who loved me would make a wish and blow me away.
mother uprooted me every summer and
planted me in the center of aunt eleanor’s garden,
where i bowed my head in shame as the other flowers bowed their heads in admiration.
she’s from the city, they would whisper amongst themselves,
their dinnerplate eyes smudged with blackened attempts at grown-up makeup,
pudgy fingers clutching at cans of coca-cola, craving their fix of sugary carbonation.
the flowers there would marry a high school sweetheart,
drop out of college,
work the dinner shift at the local pizza joint.
they would waste ecosystems picking out their own petals,
curled up in the fetal position at three in the morning,
the moon catching on their faces like it might catch on a piece of broken glass,
unable to fall asleep because they can’t stop their own mouths from
forming the shape of the words:
he loves me.

i knew this,
because i was taught this.
even a child (especially a child) could pick up
the way my mother’s shoulders began to slouch after a night or two with a man,
because she knew she was settling for the crust
when she could have had the whole loaf.
she would close the door quietly behind her when she came home,
silhouetted in the fluorescent light of the television, she’d kick off her heels
and roll her pantyhose down to the ankles,
dejectedly resign herself to a corner of the couch next to me and say,
let’s just be quiet tonight.
and she’d turn the volume on Saturday Night Live as loud as the neighbors would let us,
so that i’d hear the laughs, not
the sobs that escaped her body involuntarily,
or the shuddering sighs that followed.
she thought i was deaf to these late-night tears,
but i’d stay awake hours after she put me to bed just to make sure she had stopped
crying on the fire escape.

aunt eleanor dismisses my mother like
an atheist dismisses god, with respect but secret pride because
aunt eleanor thinks she knows me best, and tells me so.
even though i had never met my father,
i am still a child of divorce to aunt eleanor.
she tells me that i am
the lovechild of heaven and earth,
the subject of a trillion year custody battle.
aunt eleanor tells me that the horizon line is just
the tug of war rope pulled taut,
she tells me that the sun rises every day just to see me for a little while,
she tells me that before i was born,
i was a divine embryo delicately folded into the womb of the universe.
aunt eleanor whispers promises to me in the dark,
asks me to fall in love with the solar system,
make love to the moon.
sometimes, she tells me i was the cause of the big bang,
and when i die, i will die unto a supernova.
i want to shout,
I AM A WEED!
but the words don’t come out,
because a dandelion would like to be mistaken for a sunflower sometimes.

when i was younger,
mother would roll into the driveway on the last day of august,
with longer hair and a new pair of blue jeans,
and aunt eleanor and i would meet her at the front of the house.
my hair was all brushed and i was wearing a skirt aunt eleanor had bought for me,
eleanor was holding a bouquet of dandelions, she handed them
delicately to my mother.
“all those flowers in your garden and the best you could do for me were dandelions?”
i got into the front seat of the car, trying not to be noticed, hoping i wouldn’t
scratch the leather or get my skirt dirty.
aunt eleanor nodded, said
“a dandelion is a very beautiful flower.”
(aunt eleanor was a poet, and you should know that you must
never ask a poet to do anything but write, they take real world encounters to a
metaphorical extreme that is not at all suitable to a sensible, systematic lifestyle).
my mother scoffed and started the car, it purred and growled and finally roared,
we shot forward into the cinnamon dust,
the dandelion seeds blew away and were lost in the wake of the mustang,
mother turned on the radio and said with a little laugh,
"make a wish."