Fall 2012: "tangible things."

sometimes when I turned on the air conditioning in this car
it smelled like him at first, fleetingly, mint and roses and the inside of a book.
the air conditioning died the spring after he did.
she wasn’t long after that.

every time i visited her,
she held my hand. her veins
were ridges, mountain ranges, on a tiny topographical map.
but her skin,
her skin was the softest.
next my mother’s,
then my own.

when i was in the fourth grade
a boy broke my nose with a baseball.
it hurt,
and i cried myself to sleep under a blanket she crocheted with those violet-veined fingers,
tall and white like gates to a garden.
i lie beneath it now;
it is as soft as i remember her skin.