Your Little Bear has sat in your closet since you were nine and 
decided that you were too old to love it
Its threads have gone loose, and its eyes have lost their shine, and you feel bad even though
You have done nothing

It was made from childhood stitches, although not like the ones you needed when you fell and cut your knee so deep
Little Bear had wiped your tears
and you grew despite the pain of Injury and of whatever made you put that Bear 
away again

There is nothing wrong here; you’re young and your room is a mess and bright and yet somehow not bright enough for your plants to grow

And suddenly you think of all the beautiful soaps that lined the bathroom drawers; they were gifts from your mother and 
you feel sick.

Get a bad habit. Bite at your nails and stay up too late
Try to remember what it was like to be smaller, younger than you are

Find a wisdom that isn’t there
 

It was he who fought for it to stay upstairs, disrupting the ‘nice’ furniture. Its left rocker had loosened, and its right rocker had been tied back with twine.

It would go ka-thunk when

My father would sit and listen, back turned and consumed in something in

such a way that would make you question if he really heard you
When you asked him everything.

(It was then that his face would contort, saturated in emotions that proved you wrong;
He heard you, and he hurt with you,
    Slow)

I sat in the chair and felt its strange embrace—
Strange,
To sit in silence, back against the leather and feather-filled couches turned to face each other.
Strange to 
                   struggle with connection
With the man who created you.
I felt it rude to sit in silence. So I listened to the music that he would have probably liked;
Bizet,

She stood by the sea, expecting to say nothing more
But her mother pried and pried, pecking away at her will
To keep quiet; like the seagulls in the faded corners of her vision
who drove clams into
the rocks

Waiting for them to break.

So, looking straight ahead, she spoke; 
her lovely, young voice immediately taken up by the wind, lost to the 
World’s ears.
But she had spoken, nonetheless

When I say goodbye, the sea won’t change me the way you have tried to.
It will take me, hold me, suffocate
The air that ever would have been wasted

In begging, in lying just to satisfy.

She felt every elemental splinter under the callous skin of her feet. She felt the fight to stabilize herself on the rocks, and 

the life which she squashed, the mollusk and the algae and
         then felt nothing at all

Her body, deep under the ocean--it will finally tell the truth.
 

Growing up is being given things–
Memories, most typically recounted by your mother as she finishes cooking dinner

About how much you loved playing on the roadside,
blackened-by-exhaust piles of snow when you were four

          I thought you’d knock your baby teeth out. You never could stay still.

These memories are almost always said slowly. Laden with thought and caution, and care

Unfolded with a gentle hand.
Her back is turned to you, who quietly sits, waiting at the table for dinner and to feel whole.

She adds the last handful of sumac to the cast iron pan, and her voice becomes obscured by the vent
That fills the house with the heavy, unmistakable aroma.

Mujadara, now steaming from under its lid 

Sometimes you don’t know what to say
When you hear these stories,
Years of your life you hardly know

And you have no such stories to tell. 

So, she sat there, mouth-breathing for quite some time. All day, in fact. She couldn’t help it--she could still taste the cloying salt that lingered in the back of her throat. One of many physical remembrances of her romance with the sea, her bloody, suffocating romance, which had taken place in the crux of the night, where most everything was shrouded in deep black, save for the stars.

It’s always slow-going when you decide to pull the heavy book
from mama’s shelf
to find those pictures from when you were young.

You settle down, and feel the saturated CVS paper and

You stare because its funny,
That your dark, wiry hair was once light and short and honey brown

And because that was back when you wore your emotions on your face.

Bewilderment, and sweetness and Unknowing

You were still searching; eyes full of
intrigue and widened from the harsh flash of the camera.

And you stare because your mouth was caked with chocolate ice cream and, over your protruding belly, your
shirt was lovingly adorned with the runaway drips.

You stare because
you feel no tether to the young body that presents itself, oblivious to its surroundings, untouched by
illness and sadness and pride.

Go on, take the book, but after

I was inspired to draw the suffragist Alice Paul after learning about her powerful advocacy for women's rights and equality.

Filtered through a window
Teeter-tottering in your evolution
You lay your last breath on a carpet. 

Azure oil spilled blue, your remains a lasting melody.
You had been seen from my wept eyes and as the minutes passed

The damper pedals hoarse layings
Waned back to navy tides

A steady hand,
And moving mind.
Give me time and I am sure to listen.
I yearn to move through my own force and your patience.

Arriving amidst the weavings of swallowed carpet. Shadows disperse, as frightened birds find a stiller wind.
And I see them pour across your feet.

In a sticky, stinging world,
Did you come in search of me, or did you

Give me time.

Don't cry, Tee Bear, or you'll run
out of tears.

With phone calls and phone calls and not knowing
Faces toward springing terror each time the automated chord rises.
And a family being tugged on at all angles.

Mama, red eyes are a call to all I feel I can never change.

You say I know, I know
You don't look me in the eyes, running out of tears.