Summer Circles Green

Summer circles green and my hair is growing another color, silver/white like tinsel or Christmas tree ornaments or snow on the slanted roof of the artist’s yellow house, who paints her daughter blonde, reclining as in a lawn chair, her oiled canvas stretching now in a museum down the road, where we, on Sunday mornings, relax like swans, drinking flavored coffee from blackened mugs so the darkened rims don’t show.  I despise the dirty rigs on my own blue mugs, like arctic circles, tea rings, skim milk spilling on the wooden floor beneath the picnic table benches.

Summer circles green and my hair is growing another color, preparing cob-webbed gowns we wear like gauze bandages, covering the cigarette burns on our wrists and upper arms, slices of roast beef for the noonday meal, when we should be eating turkey along with last year’s yellowed photographs, boxed memories of three years’ madness, the hospital gowns, green and open in the back, displaying what we’d prefer to hide behind some sturdier covering.

Summer circles green and my hair is growing another color, asking impossible questions about misplaced rooms and lilacs beside the brick house that stained my childhood brown, brown hair like dirty ponds in winter, though I pretended it was red, imagined I was burning, wondering—will I ever be consumed like bread crumbs scattered to the pigeons that roost on slate roofs, cooing, calling—