A is for apple. We only bake the sour ones into pies, add as many handfuls of sugar as we can grasp, marvel at how much they've changed afterward. The only poison I've ever heard of is in the seeds of apples. But if you place it in the Earth, it sprouts nothing but more apples. An apple reminds me of my uterus. The red ones especially. They cup the seeds as if they'll become something one day, even though we mostly just leave them in the stripped core, place them into trash cans or, if they're lucky, toss them into the woods.
B is for butterflies, like the ones we had to brush from our clothing in Costa Rica. They stand around for too long, except the ones as blue as mirrors in the sky, the ones I try to capture in photographs but only manage to paint as blurs in my memories. You are like that when you dance, blue dress spinning outward, hands moving so I can't see them. I think about my mother's hands, how they are really words, how she speaks with motion. I think about my own short fingers. I think about my angry fists, clenching and unclenching, trying to tear the movement from the air.
C is for center. The center of gravity, higher than if I were a triangle. I center myself around an axis. I center you around my center.
D is for delinquent. I think of people who are older than me. I think of my friends and the people who are not their friends. I see jail bars, night sticks, bruises. I see handcuffs digging into flesh that might as well be plastic to them. I see my skin, remember how you told me I was transparent once, my veins like road maps lit beneath. I don't know where I'm headed. I can't recall where I've been. I pretend these footprints behind me are mine, but when I look down, I have no feet.
E is for elegant. Elegant is something I almost never feel. I feel clumsy. I feel large. Only my fingernails are elegant, like shined pearls or beads of sweat on the ends of each of my fingers. But then sometimes they're short and I garden with them and they have dirt underneath and I'm embarrassed when adults see them and I try to hide them in my mouth or my pockets or beneath me. I sit on my right hand when it moves without asking me first. I don't want the other kids to see. It takes me years to show you even, and you think it's cool, don't believe at first that I'm not telling it to move. I think you're jealous of its freedom, or maybe I'm projecting. I'm afraid to take a step without checking the rule book first. My hand contorts itself, as if calling out in agony or rage, and doesn't take the time to ask or let me know. It just knocks over my glass or tears my homework in half. I sit on it. But sometimes I just watch. I wouldn't call it elegant.
F is for forgotten. I've forgotten books on dusty shelves until they smell old, although they haven't yet been opened. I've forgotten my little brother in the back of a chain store with tanks of fish. I've forgotten until I was at the end of the aisle and a goldfish with a puffy head looked me in the eye with such longing I knew it too had forgotten someone important. I've been forgotten, left out of a photograph of an incomplete family. I've been forgotten purposefully, while I rush to keep up, realize I don't understand bus schedules or know how to leave this kingdom. I am a thirteen-year-old, and you expect me to be quite young; I look much older, but there are tears carving canyons into my cheeks. I chat with a merchant while I wait, and I feel bad when I'm distracted by how crooked her teeth are. Later, we see an armadillo. You think you're hallucinating. I think you're right.
G is for geyser. I've never been to Yellowstone, but I wrote them a letter during fifth grade when you were teaching us how to properly address formal writings. I placed my soul into that letter, creased it gently with unskilled fingers, and drew my self portrait on the envelope, a mirror image because that is how we imagine ourselves, the only way I saw me daily. The envelope I received back was blank, spare my name and the address of the elementary school. I have no image of who sent it. I think about overalls and maybe a rain jacket. Inside the envelope was a brochure for Yellowstone Park. I've never been there. But I've seen pictures of their goats, their trees, their faithful geysers. Sometimes I feel like that's close enough.
H is for hyperbole. I use about a million of those every day.
I is for ice. Like in my veins, ice that only melts on those summer evenings when the sky is so clear I can see myself in it and you tell me that if there were no branches above us you wouldn't believe we weren't drowning. In February the icicles on the roof drip dirty water into my hair. I stand there anyway, stubborn. There is frost crawling across my skin, spelling my name over and over again in cursive. They all look different somehow.
J is for justice. I grew up knowing my country was drowning. You stared at the backs of my eyes and found only water where my soul should be, soaking into the window frames until they are so swollen they crack like my grandmother's feet like the layers of the Earth like young people bursting with laughter, their seams stretching until you can see what's inside of them.
K is for killing. I try not to think about war, which is easy because I live here, where I see more red in trees than in blood and the mountains slouch on all sides of me as if they were put there to protect us but know their job is really a joke and are just waiting for the week to end so they can head home to easy chairs and mugs of hot tea or hot spiced cider or love. The soil beneath my fingernails when I dig my gardens used to be alive. The world was made of bones so recently I wonder how we can grasp sticks to throw for our dogs and not think first that they are femurs.
L is for liminal. I find myself in a doorway and don't know whether I'm coming or going. You push me, they pull me, and I don't ever move. My life is a transition. I have no name. They look at me but never see me, stare through my sometimes, or see themselves reflected off the beads of sweat on my skin.
M is for money. It stains my hands. I can smell it on me for days. When I clutch coins in my bare fists, they eat through me like I'm candy and they're deprived children on Halloween. I string shiny silver dimes from fishing line and hang them from stars so we think we can see more of them. You tell me it's a bad idea, but you help me name the new constellations anyway. You polish more dimes every Sunday, repeating over and over that you need to see yourself in them before they're ready.
N is for neo-Nazi. I see myself in their shaved heads. A shadow with a swastika in the middle. I haven't met many of them lately. The people where I'm from scare them away. We don't want hate like that. We don't want your kind of hate. We have children here.
O is for organs. I have them in my body and your fingers run across them, playing dirges with some lullabies in between. When I sleep, I dream about the circulatory system. I hear it pumping through my ears, feel it in the parts where my body folds into itself. Sometimes I have ten heartbeats folded into my fists, one at the base of each of my fingers. They keep me up at night, penetrate my dreams, reminding me that I'm alive when I didn't ask and don't need to know. They hammer my flesh, oscillating through my bones to my chest, interrupt my breathing and shove me out of bed. Then your fingers come, weaving mismatched lullabies throughout my body, chasing sleep back into my core.
P is for pretty. I listen to you too often and my thighs not often enough. The veins in my legs look like the naked branches of winter time trees that don't sprout buds of new leaves when spring finally comes. They look like my mother's. When I was seven, the doctors cut tiny slices all down her legs and tore out some of her veins. I remember her on the couch afterward, legs bound in ace bandages; I remember bringing her cups of almost-clear tea in glass mugs, my reflection drowning at the bottom. I have a spider vein on the top of my left thigh. I think about spider webs hidden in the grass, sticking to my toes so I pull strands of silk behind me wherever I walk. She tears them off and rubs them from her hands, a disgusted look on her face.
Q is for queer. Strange. Odd. She had a queer feeling that they were being watched. Informal, usually offensive (esp of a man) homosexual.
R is for reason. I don't always have one, other than the halo of fog blocking my eyes and the boxes of matches in my pockets.
S is for silence. I remember how invisible I used to be, how I opened my throat to scream and moths flew from it like ashes. I remember choking on them. My breath fluttered like wings, trying not to exist, to disturb the air as little as possible so they wouldn't notice me. I would lay my face on the desk and pretend to dream but really just try to form syllables upon my tongue, try to feel the words to match my feelings. I wrote poems about how beautiful mountains are and about waiting for winter to come. I watched her write my name in her skin with a knife. I watched her blood stain my carpet, watched her try to clean it up, remember thinking she was only rubbing it in, deeper, deeper.
T is for train. I think about my little brother's second birthday. We rode the train and saw Santa Clause. He gave us gingerbread cookies and told us to be good. I was good back then. I wished on stars every night and sang songs to ease my brother to sleep. I read during recess and wanted to be like Cam Jansen, read all of her books. I think about the train of a dress, heavier than it should be. I think about trains that carry people into the after-life. You told me you tried to catch the same train as your mother once. My eyes teared up. We were sitting at a table together at the time, in an anonymous cafe on the corner of some quaint street. I wanted to fold you into my pocket like a love note. I wanted to tuck you under the velvet layer of my jewelry box. You smelled like citrus, and I wanted to get lost in your hair. I cried every time you spoke.
U is for understand. I can't. Not now. I still have bruises that looks like fingerprints on my thighs. I still have foreign breath on my neck, can smell it when nightmares shake me awake in the dark. I dream about streetlights, about drowning in pools of light that are meant to keep you safe. I dream about being alone, about walking alone, and now sleeping alone. My flesh has grown back where the chin stubble rubbed it away, sand paper to my wood finish. I planted seeds in my open wounds, nurtured them with kind words and sunlight. Nothing has grown back yet. I can't tell if there are roots. Sometimes I think I feel them, winding down around my ribcage and up toward my belly button, intertwined with my vocal cords, resting on my eardrums, stretching their limbs down to the bottoms of my feet, out to the tips of my toes. But sometimes there is nothing. Sometimes, most times, I am empty.
V is for violets. African violets were my paternal grandmother's favorite flower. After she died during my seventh grade school year, we went to Ohio to her funeral. Going through the things she loved, I found a plastic violet in a pot. I took it, liking the knowledge that I had a plant that would never die.
W is for window. They told me once that the eyes are the window to the soul, but I think my soul is in my throat. I can feel it there, strumming songs on my tendons and teasing my vocal cords. I saw you through a window once; the glass made the highlights in your hair disappear so the next time I saw you through only air you seemed somehow different to me. I was never sure how you looked. Even now, I can't picture you unless I draw the world around you first and then fill in the missing space. I draw the corner of the doctor's office waiting room, the tiny child-sized chairs you insisted we sit in even after you were taller than most adults. I draw your shoes folded onto each other on the floor. I draw your bed, the covers thrown to the side, none of the sheets matching the pillowcases matching each other. I remember that's how you liked your environment, clashing but always making sense. I draw the garden, empty holes awaiting bulbs, your gloves sitting lonely in the grass while you have wandered inside for lemonade. I draw the kitchen floor, remember you sitting cross-legged in front of the door, tossing aluminum foil balls again and again all afternoon, laughing every time the new kitten would bring them back. I draw the glass pane of a window. I see you missing behind it.
X is for x-ray. It usually is. One of my earliest memories is of my dad carrying me through the hospital parking lot on my way to get an x-ray. I was wearing puppy dog slippers with bells on the ears. One of my ankles was broken. Dad had dropped me in the kitchen. It was two days before Christmas, and my hair was the color of snow. My sister was at home laying cookies on a plate, wondering whether they would last long enough for Santa to come. We didn't have a fireplace back then. We hung stockings on our doorknobs so we'd have something to do when the sun woke us up. We weren't allowed to go into the living room until seven. I carried mugs of hot tea to my father in his chair. He could pick me up as if I were paper. He called his hugs bear hugs and I felt like all of me was being squished at once. I didn't mind.
Y is for you. You are the one who reminds me of me. You are the one who reminds me of who I want to be. You pick me bouquets of daisies, and you know to break the leaves off the stems so the water doesn't turn sour. You dance. You like the moonlight because it reminds you to dance, the way it tricks the grass with shadows that are only slightly darker than the dark, the way it seems so thick you could drink it but you can't quite reach it anyway.
Z is for zipper. There is one between my lips that I try to open, but it closes in both directions. I tug on your shirt, needing help, but when you turn to me you are caught off guard by your reflection in the metal. You hide your face behind lace curtains in the desert. I want to tell you I've walked around the Earth three times to get here and that the bottoms of my feet have been worn away. I want to tell you that there is sand in each of my pores trying to be castles but my body's tides are too strong to let them last. I want to tell you that I saw you from miles away and memorized your shadow before we even met. I want to tell you that you have your mother's ears, always ready, holding faux gemstones, unashamed, too busy straining for music to feel much of anything but love. I want to tell you these things, but my lips are metal sealed tightly to each other.
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