Two Poems

October 19th, 1989

I was born with a blue stone in my mouth.

Over time people told me,

My, what big eyes you have.

A doctor once stopped my mother on the street

while she pushed me in a stroller.

If only I was twenty years younger!

I hid the stone under my tongue.

As I grew older, the stone turned to glass.

I became acquainted with the smell of tar,

delicate and unearthly in the darling black.

The branches of shrubs scratched my skin.

White flowers grew all around me like a fence

or delivered to the house in a truck.

I can’t remember which.

January 1st, 2015

In my dreams my great grandmother

sends me text messages

about not losing her jewellery.

I once had a map for complex emotions.

What exactly does it mean

to be “high functioning”?

I found my first grey hair.

My glass face and I have taken to the bed.

The remains of the white milkweed

grow emphatically beneath my body.

When I was little, I adored a plaster mold

of my mother’s teeth.

I came to know the exact position

of her incisors, canines, bicuspids.

Caressed the tiny indents on each molar.

I admired the porcelain cast

with the hope that my baby teeth

would take the same perfect form.