Belen

[photo: Dixie Canyon, LA, Sheryl Taylor, morning walks]

I figure out how to make myself a shelterbelt. In the country you get yourself old school tobacco sticks to construct your castle. Two beds on the bottom, build that thing up around you: chairs, a table on the top, but where is out. You break your house getting out of it. There is no other way unless you make a jump, but most of the time the construct’s knocked down. I’d rather disassemble myself thank you than have you carry my body to the ground with your hands. The city gives you a tenement & a cold, work in a BBQ restaurant where rich go to slum. There are so many cats on the street to feed; they follow in a line to the bodega for food, crying in a line, all bones, in the dark behind you. Locals think crazy, but cats die. I hole this bastard in, put confederate jasmine in the window sill for a light switch, go paint the room sunshine yellow. Of a night I fill a cooking pot with water to lay atop the radiator, the cats curl round my body sides for heat. Everything in the body is tied to the body, the windows, photo collage, wrapped around boxes of art, the floor needs sweeping & everything washed. The part that cracks or cracked under what you think might be legs running through a pile of Georgia woods, your mama calling but there is no home; Belen gets out there alone, will she let someone make her dinner, the Franklin Ave shuttle rattles pennies on the dresser, & drive your mother engine cause there is country for which a car means I will go do it.