...dance more.

The midwest drowns my mind, covers these chilly, treeless days in the sticky humidity of summers where my heart learned to burst, alone. You don't recover from moments like that, no amount of idyllic yellow-red leaves will absorb those poisons, die for those sins. So many sins in so little space. Each one brancing, growing, budding from the last. The roots become entrenched, they become culture--an entire culture grown from dirt, sometimes I'm surprised any of us grow. Was it a windy day, or some holy breath, whispered only to us in the clods between our fingers. Only He can move us. Here, I ride up in circles, I think, "How high?" How high can we go here, mama? How high can I go because I've been stuck in one place my whole life and ain't nothin like the feeling of air like blood through my veins. How high. I used to plea to be pushed to the sky, push me up hard against the sun, safe against the crater of thick yellow plastic and now all I have to do is leap. So close. But here they are, mama, they preach the same way as they did back home, but where is the substance in such a flighty place full of such flighty souls, muzzled up like frightened red birds, we are making messes of dichotomies. My soulstomach burrowed like a worm to dirt to find nourishment and I huddle to find some semblance of the dirt I grew up on. The soil so fertile and pure here, and they wonder why I scream and scoff and mourn in the same breath of my full-bellied laughter. You don't recover. From veins ruptured. Your best friend drowning. Intestines curdling. What happened when she was 10. Scars traced with clean, sharp steel. She holds a baby. Yet I hold holiness. In each breath I remember what held my feet, with each breath I remember what freed them. Holy holy. Yet such profanity. I run his thick brown curls through my fingers, knowing the dirt, this familiarity, yet knowing three months ago this would've been a dream, two months ago the reality made me squeamish, one month ago the contrast made me neauseous. Thick curls the color of dirt. A history in Hebrew and spoken words never learned in Bible school, a mouth that tells taudry tales of boys' dicks. Such dirty profanities our history tells. I hold my tongue. I hold his hair. I can feel the confessions seep like sap, then the relief. Our wounds close up. I close my eyes tight. A million histories, a million sins, a million broken birds budded from forbidden fruit trees. Like my grandma's stomach when I asked about Bethlehem, our lungs rumble when the air sifts through cilia. An equalizing moment of disability. We rumble. Under bare-branched trees we move our limbs in the frozen soil and we rumble.