I am an unhappy soul in the way that the telephone wire tangles.
It slips from my hand when I answer because it is knotted too high.
The phone clatters against the wall. Through the receiver my mother
asks what’s wrong. I would play with the cord when I was young,
watching the loops fit around my pinky, my index. I would wear it
as a ring or as a bracelet and I thought about what it meant to be a girl.

I was never a girl, or always one. I wanted to be the mother
when I played house and I would answer the phone, “Hello, Olsons.”
but the person on the other end always thought I said oceans
or they thought I was my mother. When I was twelve, I went with her
and I saw the ocean for the first time. I was so far from home.
I don’t remember the way the beach air hung or the look of the horizon.

I felt uncomfortable taking my shirt off, and I read a book.
There was a sign asking me not to take any sea shells so I left them
like so many tiny treasures wanting desperately to be found, but I
knew that back home my mother had a wicker basket full of shells
that I would soak my hands in when she was gone, because I didn’t
like it when people asked me questions about what I was doing.

I am never doing anything, I imagined I’d tell them. I am breathing.
I am composing a song in my head. I am loving the feel of cool shells
against the dead skin of my knuckles and knowing how they sound
nothing like the ocean because my mother is not inside them
asking me to take my shoes off, to feel the rush of water between my toes,
to live life like the grains of sand pressed against our callused feet.

06/28/2007

Author's Note: I kind of let it wind itself and maybe it tangled like a telephone cord but sometimes I like it tangled.

Posted on 06/28/2007
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