Dad said there were bats in the attic.
We dug a hole to China at the top of the hill.
But if we had dug a hole through the center of the Earth,
we’d have popped up through the Pacific Ocean.
Grandma’s bed was always made
with a dusty pink and yellow Afghan
that smelled like Easter Sunday
and was faded where the sun shone through
the ice-crystalline window.
Beneath the bed were cans of green beans
and jars labeled “Peaches – 2000” in a loopy scrawl of permanent marker on the lid.
There were yellow sparkles in the linoleum bathroom floor and
The bathroom counter was always covered in mud and sugary slush,
the heating ducts surrounded by wet boots and
tiny, shivering bodies.
If you looked up on a sunny January day, you
would see the sun pass through the aspens and ponderosas
like a New Mexican Narnia.

My mom had just found me from my
hiding place in the synthetic ivy-covered cabinet
when Grandma presented a lavender corduroy jumper
with a daisy embroidered on the bottom left-hand corner.
The buttons the same metallic temperature
As my great-grandmother’s alabaster hands
The color the same as the book of fairytales
I was given on my eighth birthday.
The one with the story about a girl who
refused to turn into seafoam