What I Remember

I am three years old
I am about to dance Madame Butterfly
I am in the dressing room
I am watching the older girls
Carefully applying dramatic makeup
to one another, I am admiring
their graceful figures, I am looking at
my little swollen belly, I am already imagining
my future self as a beautiful ballet dancer.

I am three years old.
I accidentally push my best
friend off of the front porch
and she breaks her tiny arm.
I think it was an accident,
we share a birthday and we
remain friends after her bones heal.

I am four years old,
I am so excited for preschool
that I can’t sleep, I can’t
keep my hands off of my first-day-of-school
dress, it is fuschia wish yellow and blue and
purple flowers. Everyone at catholic school
has to wear uniforms except the preschoolers.
At the end of the day, I forget
where I live and I don’t get off
of the school bus and the driver
doesn’t find my exhausted four-year-old
self until she almost leaves the bus lot.

I am four years old,
My sister is almost two,
I am desperate for attention
all the time. My mother makes
pea soup and I cry while she threatens
to put me to bed without dinner,
I try to eat the soup, but I am
overcome with anger so I can’t
keep it down. My mother sends me
to bed without dinner.

I am five years old
And my father and I are
playing with beeswax on
The living room floor. He works
nights and I am not normally
allowed to bother him while he sleeps
through the day. Moments
with him are treasured, the beeswax
is smooth and malleable but
my hands cannot decide
what to make with it.

I am four, maybe five,
my parents and I are in the kitchen
and it is evening,
we have just come home from
somewhere, some gathering
and I beg them to let me
have a giant gulp of whipped cream.
We take turns laughing deliriously
and spraying whipped cream
right into each others’ mouths.

I am four and five and six
and I have a crush on the boy
who lives upstairs. He is seven
or eight or nine but we are
best friends. When his mother
gets married, I wear a dress
that could have been a Monet,
covered in ivy like the house
at the end of our street. After
the ceremony, the boy and I
rip newspaper into thousands
of little pieces so that we can toss
them over his mother
like it’s a new year.

It is my birthday, probably my fourth
and my father makes me cover my eyes
to walk outside the house to see my
special present. My whole family is there,
I am shuffling my size little kid sized 11 feet,
Everything is blank with my eyes squeezed
tightly shut, then eyes open to teal colored Huffy
with a bell, and pink streamer clad handlebars
so that I could ride and ride and ride and the wind
would make the pink streamers soar alongside me.