poem on the deck.

circles of limestone or some other gray rock situated in the yard she found them in someone’s winter wheat field last summer.

warm outside at 10:52 PM and I try to ignore the mosquitos

humming at my elbows

pink with itching

pork with icing.

the sky so deep black I could press my palm upward

supination and it would be covered black ink

flip it over again to make a print on my mother’s deck

like those banners at children’s museums

handprints in red, yellow, green

pure colors from the tube

no mixing

obnoxiously bright unlike the hazy grays early

morning.

sometimes I pretend she is staying in West Virginia

for a while and she’ll be back next spring more frail

then the last.

and my mother hasn’t redone our house

stripped the yellow orange cracked tiles with a

straight and even navy.

I visit home like a stranger

and lie on the deck next to the field picked rock

pressing my palms upward

touching the awkward thick goo in the sky

why not dip my whole body

drinking refrigerated peppermint tea from glass bottles

with profound quotes and proverbs under the

lid.

we saw a mountain lion in the headlights

the other night driving into the valley the most eerie

feeling a deformed deer with a winding tail

tricking me begging me wanting me

to follow

its swish swish sounds drought covered through

the alders.

one of my favorite stories as a child was called “Moss Gown”

and I thought of all of this when the mountain lion

asked me to follow.

but she redid the kitchen and nothing is cracked

except the mug she cannot part with.

and she is cradled in earth

underground in West Virginia far away from my

mountain lion fantasies in Montana…

(For my Grandma, of course).