For The 5 Months of Bloody Mountain Memories

It was somewhere - sometime between

when I hung my hair wild

and when you stopped letting me.

Rain and oak took us by the hand, telling us to forget

that we smell like dingy hotel floors.

You grasped my thumb like the claws of a hawk,

leading me up the mountain terrain, pausing to

cram my gold, hummingbird nests

into a red velvet band. Four miles? Four decades?

"It doesn't matter."

The purple weeds weaved

around my ankles, the knots and thorns

begged me to lay down with them.

I held buttercup blossoms under your chin

while you picked grub shells off bark

and told me tales of how bugs

know the seasons.

I'm sure we were going somewhere,

but I'm not sure if we got there.

I'm not sure it matters.

Dirt clung between our toes.

Blood dribbled from the scab in your calf.

Mine dried to my elbows: red velvet cake.

It trickled in estuaries from the blisters on

our ankles to our half gone toes.

Blood - flakey blood:

you told me to let it run down my skin,

to let it stain my legs brick.

You told me not to worry - to throw away band aids

because blood was the color of my hair before

the sun bleached my youth with rules

of what's day and what's night.

You taught me to rise from my soil

each morning to wrap

my body around the rocks and trees

when the leather bark burns my

freckled flesh.