the blue-fire girl.

1965, and the blue-fire girl smiles at me
across her field
of bluebells, daisies and lace-flowers; she calls them
her pride and strength, her hope and prayers.
her skirt is stained with blueberry jam
and bread crumbs under the whiteout
of sunshine spreading over her
garden of cerulean-breasted lovers
she was too young to return the passion-yellowed letters to.

military men, dressed in off-azure
uniforms swayed straight lines of strange
behavior and stiff mannerisms in her front lawn,
and she knotted her
knee-highs that had been dyed by the sea,
between her fingernails
she had painted with the sky. her golden-eyed,
flaxen-haired brother waited in his impatience,
bouncing on the wooden floorboards,
his face flushed
but his lips pale.

her brother waved goodbye:
“goodbye, blue-fire girl,
i’ll be back again on some sunset dawn,
in each of your indigo flotilla
poems you try to hide from the big ol’ scary army man you
call your brother.”

she cuddled the pillows her mother
had fashioned out of her eyes,
out of the sapphire nestled
between her bloodshot, tear-filled sclera and pupil
(glossily smeared with her sunrise somnolence, monotony,
bliss in her melancholic misery).

1966: a couple dreary, rain-drenched
months-that-end-in-ary later,
she received a discolored envelope with the edges
bit by teeth; her brother’s teeth (she knew). the
letter read,

“my blue-fire girl,
i can’t wait to arrive home and watch
your fingertips dance that blue-fire ballet again,
over those black-and-white keys
that just look so damaged now that you stopped
playing, now that i went off to the
sea-foam cobalt jungles
tucked away in this ocean-locked country. i’m learning
to loathe the taste of old fish,
old scales stinging my lips.

when i get home,
i want to hear my blue-fire girl
play her blue-fire ballet again.

sincerely, the big ol’ scary army man
you call your brother.”

more months passed, the dreaded
months-ending-in-ber coming
to steal away her steel pastures
of hope and knowing
her brother would come back. it suddenly
became apparent her steel pastures
were now soppy, gooey, mushy prussian-powder fields
of rotting cowhide and the decomposing pillow cases
fashioned out of her
newly swollen eyes.

intervals of kings and queens, jacks of broken souls
and slaves to the public rule:
the blue-fire girl cried nights away
fiddling with
diamonds, clubs, heart-thieves, babies in her belly
and unusable spades to dig up her meadowlands,
to replant her decayed bluebells.

1973 had come along and that blue-fire girl
was then a blue-fire woman
with a new sister of her own
and two young children named after that
army man she called her brother. she had
new freckles on the wide bridge
of her nose,
new veins she had never seen
perching out like cardinals or robins
from her sullied summer-white daybreak
within the depths of murky despair
hidden behind teal lashes.

but her big ol’ scary army man
never came home. he only left
behind a pile of turquoise
letters written to the wrong address,
a pair of boots with the words
grace and god
written in sloppy letters on their
tips, and a picture of him;
of her golden-hearted, golden-eyed
brother.

not the big ol’ scary army man;
but her flaxen-haired kinship
that lost both his legs and died in those
sea-foam cyan jungles,
naked, violently navy vines
showing off his blood-deprivation (his oxygen-deficiency, his
starvation, his lack of right-and-wrong for fighting without
a cause.)

1975 and that blue-fire girl (woman)
finally got to see her brother again; his fingertips
the shade of her irises,
the pigment of her foul crocuses that
breathed in the spring air in their steel blue
pastures, his mind lost in the
want and never-to-be-fulfilled need to
hear, just one last time…

to hear her
blue-fire girl ballet.