Flying Girl Remembers Nights of Grass and Sky, or Markings

Flying Girl Remembers Nights of Grass and Sky, or Markings
022/100 in 100 Creative Challenge, 6/23/09
Golden Fluid Acrylic, watercolor pencil, pitt artist pen on watercolor paper, 5"x8"

Where are you and your crazy stories from, anyway? asks my friend Marta.

Such a long story.

I am from a city of cement and flame. The Bronx is burning in abandoned tenements and poetry.

I am from the pictures that won't stay in my head, won't stay in my father's head and need to come out on the page.

I am from hard times and walk up flats in soon to be condemned buildings. I am from slums where cats scream in the alley and empty lots grow forests off cool breath. Where grandmothers cook rice and beans and read cards for people who don't pay.

I am from reading at night under the covers and behind curtains and in cars and at the dinner table and beneath the school lockers. From dragons and magic, from universes untold. I am from painting and singing, and the smooth feel of an empty page beneath my fingers.

I am from chanting in Japanese. And rooms full of sound and incense, like blood pulsing through everyone.

I am from summers on the farm and cool hills dusted with buttercups and indian paintbrush and snap dragons. Forests of mint leaves and blackberries and fairy rings.

I am from the crocheted beret my mother wore, and her long long hair, cut short in independence when she finally left my father for his madness.

I am from the subways taking me away and bringing me back and the finding of lessons in the way the tree branches shadowed the hilly street.

I am from still looking for meaning.

I am from penstrokes and brushstrokes like train tracks and ancient calligraphy.

I am from the layers of what has past and from and the destruction of gentrification. The possibility. The dreams.

I am from the words. And the paint. The sound and the dust.