Mmory Sketches

Trying to catch some fireflies here.

Mmory5:

Early Beatles blaring out the open side window over the three-foot pool crowding the bottom yard. Me curled in a lawnchair on the concrete patio through the basement door, dad grilling hamburgers. Please Please Me or Love Me Do? I was devouring the end of a book I wanted to last forever, in the grip of its sci-fi climax--a girl proving capable of herself. My sister swimming like a fish, back and forth across the pool-aquarium, her translucent fingers wrinkling over its metal edge like tops of question marks. Nothing as brief as late summer stretches out so far beyond itself, smelling of twilight and other burning things.

Mmory4:

They are building a house—sudden dozens of big houses—in the lot up the block. Acres of houses where there was a meadow, and beyond that woods sloping down to the creek that runs also behind my house. The houses are framed out and trespassable and we do. We try out a spigot. We talk about returning when all the plumbing is turned on in all the houses to flood them. Why would they build here? That expanse, up past the elementary, it kept us separate, kept us hidden, us down the creek, us on our small snail of road curling round the hill towards the firehall and the river. The skeletal development has a sign: Coming Soon—Victoria Glen. But the only Glen we know sells pot down at the park and rides a dirt bike. We all do.

Mmory3:

I dream of a swingset made of metal, a contraption monstrous as a scoliotic brace. But, also, you could push yourself with arms not legs, an industrial-type pump as if we children were all of us water-hoarders, training to drain dry the deepest well. Weeks later we visit cousins in New York and, with them, follow a shaggy creek through ravine to a green park with pines, and the beast I dreamed is there, and I tell no one... knowing prophecy a fickle business. Seeing, even at this raw age, how people untrust a truth not manufactured within their own machines.

Mmory2:

We plotted an escape on the spaceshipped bedspread: lines of egress between bedroom planets, the comet-path stairway, oxygenless plans B and C should we be discovered by the enemy. Down below convulsed a dinner party to which we were not invited and for whom we did not wish to perform. Day etched itself into night, late light clicking through the window fan. Beneath our feet they laughed and it was guillotines. The danger broadcast—we were so easy to dismiss, forget, toss into a void apart from their loud and clinking world. I admit, it felt a type of freedom. If only we could slip past them and reach the sloping sideyard, where a few rosebushes brandished cruel small thorns but little else ever cut amiss, our exhaustion in the wet grass would welcome us. Tell us we had no need of being held by anything save gravity.

Mmory1: (These will have holes.)

We [six] walked a whole yesterday through a forest of dead trees and lithe tree-choking vines until we reached the open. An enormous field of fireflies and tall yellowy grass hummed caught sun in the growing dark. A picnic blanket spread before us cokes and watermelon. Did I sit? I cartwheeled. My red handkerchief dress an upside-rightside-down poppy, a rolling cola can-can. Fireworks tipped out of some star bucket onto an uncityscape jutting the adolescent shoulders and hips of rollercoaster, an empty pie-faced wheel. The far side of amusement. Only one of my siblings was there I think, so I’d be young, my parents then, a woman named Cherry, a man named Brook.