December 22, 2014
King Llanza
I never had a closet.
Always a big utility drawer
to keep all my clothes, accessories,
and hoarded items.
Shirts to match the hues
of my stained glass heart. Concealed
lust and relieved discomfort: the role
of my underwear,
just under where a pair of pants is
ready to walk me into my shape.
I knew I was different, soft as gratitude
underneath dilated eyes
to a rainbow;
the storm is as forgotten a name
as water in
and on the soil
water in the air
the sky.
Oh how abundance becomes
the smell of dirt after a burden falling
all at once,
looking up is an open suggestion.
I am but a clear puddle, willing
to mimic the clouds as they part
with silver-lined edges.
Every day I dress comfortably.
Today, I look in the mirror asking:
“How could anybody not notice the soil
of his brown eyes, holding
such a vibrant hologram garden?”
My flowery brain, a static of colors
entangled by the stem.
I sit with my mother at the living room
and ask her to undo my knots, the way
she would of my late sister’s hair
that reaches to her hips, curtaining
who I truly am before anyone else.
Teary-eyed, scared
she’d pull them out like weeds.
Instead, her arms hold me
like a cradle in the restless and forgotten
nights of my infancy. She said:
We’ve always wondered. But here, before
me, the dear promise after the flood…
A little of a year’s time before this,
my mother bought seven plain V-neck tees—
each a color of that curved light which
stands on both ends—for me.
