February 2023

February 2023

It starts with the birds, and a night warm enough to leave the windows open. The buds on the trees, the leaves that held on, the green coming back to the cedar. The lemon grass, not yet, but you look for it one day. And the memory shakes something, wakes something up.

The robins and wrens and good luck returns. You half convince yourself it’s not happening. That the sun never really was that warm. That we will never be that warm again.

But the daffodils and their quiet brass band demand we hope. Demand we look.

The girl goes out with her knife to cut and keep some in a vase for me. I know they’re for me because she doesn’t look at them.

She is busy biting her tongue and sewing the books together. She leaves me the flowers and asks if I’ve ever been in love, if I’ve ever needed to repent. She asks about the girl who was here before her, the seamstress.

The one our ladylord called heavy footed. The girl asks if I miss her.

She’s written us a letter. About why she had to go.

The broken steps. The broken pipes. The broken heat in winter. The peace and everything that stood in the way of it.

I don’t know how to love a girl. You can’t cut flowers for a vase on her desk. She has no kitchen drawers to surrender to the mice. There is no room inside her. She does all her living inside me and keeps the other side of her skin for the messy bits. The blood and bones. I don’t know how to love a girl like that.

She keeps stitching the stories together, she is making a wedding dress. “There won’t be a wedding,” she says. She tells me about the times she tried to fall in love before, about the scientist and the apple that fell from his tree. “I’ve always liked the apple more than the fall.”

I can’t tell her about the seamstress, but I think she understands.

When the dryer breaks, she isn’t angry. She runs the wash again and says, “This is how I know you’re a lady like me.” I’ve never met a perfect woman, only girls who haven’t broken yet.

Apples to apples, dusk to dusk,

the apple house