coffee

I use to keep my Barbie clothes in my Dad's old Folgers can. Whenever I breathe in the smell of coffee, I still envision miniature plastic pink high-heels, matching floral print dresses and teeny-tiny little fluorescent coloured bathing suits.

Millie, my elderly next door neighbour, once had a tiny yellow porcelain toilette figurine resting on the back of her own human sized toilette.

When I was 5, I fell in love with this mini toilette and for months after would visit just to sit in her bathroom and admire it.

Sometimes I'd bring my Barbies over, just so they could pee too.

Millie took pity and sympathy on my Barbie's poor bladders-- as they'd sometimes have to hold their pee in for days at a time- between our visits. Deep down, she didn't want my Barbie house to be filled with the daunting stench of Barbie and Ken urine, so she graciously awarded me her miniature yellow porcelain toilette, for being her favorite neighbour.

I was so thrilled that sometimes most of my play time consisted of Barbies taking turns going poop.

And that's what the smell of Coffee reminds me off...

Barbie turds.

pr i de

pieces

When she fell for the first time,

Gravel mixed with blood.

With tweezers,

your hands, were the only

patient and gentle enough to pluck every pebble

from torn flesh.

She healed, for the first time

because of you.

But she falls. Again. And again. because of you.

and each time body hits earth,

skin opens, to reveal.

Her falls, turn flesh

into ground, to stumble.

and you become,

the gravel, wedged deep beneath

broken skin.

Tiny flecks of grey,

enter through crimson,

and hide below the layers of translucent white.

Sometimes she swears she can see you,

long after wounds have grown over,

she still feels you, she still knows

you are there.

Foreign material, in the pores of a beating, hurting soul.

Gravel in elbow. in knee cap. in chin. in heart.

Gravel too tiny, too numerous, too hidden

for any human hand to remove.

P i e c e s of you, crawl through her.

they creep into the sacred parts,

into the painful spaces,

no band-aid can guard.

Pieces of gravel,

find one another, deep, deep, deep, in

and claw at her aching chest, to get out.

But it is her skin, that has grown over you,

enfolded you, imprisoned you.

Yet she is the one,

who feels trapped,

by the healing

of her secret hurts.

And every night she wonders,

how much longer you'll live,

wedged under the skin

you once tried to mend.

.breznichar of bohemia.

"I feel her in unexpected moments, her Assumption into heaven happening in places inside me. She will suddenly rise, and when she does, she does not go up, up into the sky, but further and further inside me. August says she goes into the holes life has gouged out of us"

- Sue-Monk-Kidd