At Age Twelve       

          - for Julia

On Saturday nights she dances alone in her room.
The walls, a shade of blue-green called Belize.
Zebra striped rug, a catch-all for lint and spinning,
her antique mirror quivering with techno bass.

On her dresser, a palette of eye shadow
and lip gloss hinges open like a keyboard.
She plays at being a woman, trails her fingertips
across the iridescence, is pinioned on high notes

of pumps borrowed from her mother’s closet.
She collects Mardi Gras masks, plumes and sequins,
wraps her Barbie doll minions in duct tape miniskirts.
Her paintings whisper a different story—
shell pink heart with angel wings and halo,
sunflowers in an Earth shaped vase,
and her mother’s favorite— freefalling leaves
and feathers, a riotous migration caught midair.

In the morning her mother gathers a trail
of eggshells and apple cores, watches the birds
outside her daughter’s window and wonders why
God gifted them with both song and flight,
despite such fragile, hollow bones.
Her nested princess wearing ebony gloss
on her toenails and fearing no ocean.
The blue jay opening its wings
to the morning sky like a black tipped flower.