Mom

She knew how to bend the soil 

Into color

How to scare off Starlings and squirrels from her bird feeders so they wouldn't eat all of the food that she's left for finches, chickadees, Michigans robins

how to press her flowers into books and make roses flat like paper and somehow still hold the color red

This way you could

Keep them forever 

She knew how to hold her hands just right when folding bread and the perfect amount of flour to turn it over and over like waves 

And sometimes I wondered what all of this was doing for the kingdom of a God 

All this beauty was it enough

But every time I look at her I feel like I'm looking at Jesus

Have you see her wrinkly hands?

The way her skin has changed with years of pressing on us, lifting us, scaring away the squirrels 

She has built mountains

And I can see it now 

I want my hands to look like hers 

..

I go walking past 

My floppy hat flapping onto my occipital bone and 

He

Looks

Me

In

The

Eye

Reading my face. 

"Is everything well? How are you? Have things gotten better? How can I help? What do you need?" All in a glance

He says it

 as he continues his current conversation. 

5

I take a collection, all of it 

The way it felt when my brother shoved the burning stick in my side and wasn't sorry the way my mom taught me to hover over a public toilet like her mother taught her the way he sounded, screaming, when I couldn't get to him and it was only a door in the way and could it have changed everything about you now if someone had stood up to them 

& the way I have tried to change my mind about God and still feel the need for surgery still the fear it seeps in sometimes and I see all my split ends my cellulite my humanity

How do I say all of it in five minutes 

.

I have been affected by many things. 

But this. 

This is the most. 

I have felt this shovel move me. 

Today

Today we saw two fat men near the same towel 

A red headed boy with a waitressing apron in which he collected shells near the edge of the ocean, he went around swinging his arms like a seagull, wetting his hands and entertaining himself with his collecting 

Two men, shoulder to shoulder, the banana republic type 

Umbrellas vibrating in the wind, leaning into it

We saw a wind surfer who knew the waves and the wind like someone would know a daughter 

I find the clutter of a boat yard lovely,  all of the boats cheeks slapped with rust or patches of fresh paint and dingy windows and grunting fishermen, grunting buoys, grimy nets 

The pelican, bursting with coveting and pecking at each other with beaks and beady eyeballs