Place your bare feet on the designated
footprints, raise your hands above
your head.

Take an oath to the Hokey Pokey
then mentally flick the spinner,
call “left leg blue, right hand orange.”

Meanwhile appreciate that Homeland
Security has replaced the color-coded
advisory system. 

Concede that tooth whitening strips
contain trace amounts of metal
enough to trigger alarms.

Rush to the gate and find a plane but
no crew— sit by a window with a view
then practice inhaling slowly.  

Discover a crew and a plane but mechanical 
difficulties. Consider the nostalgic notion of trains
the way the track schedule clicks into existence. 

Inclement weather with holding patterns-
you needed this nudge to donate 
online to Doctors Without Borders.

Stuck in a southbound airport— say seven Hail 
Mary’s and consider your sins how they pile
up, the Red Sea, how it parted on demand.

Realize there is never compensation 
for acts of God and remember that seat
cushions may be used as a flotation device.

“I decide to accept as true my own thinking.”  Georgia O’Keefe

Her death decade, you hang a calendar on the crumbling yet
historic lath and plaster walls of the third floor walk-up you share 
with three other nursing students.  Each month you predict

if the next painting will feature bones or blooms.  There
is no apparent pattern and you begin to classify months, weeks
and days as skull or flower filled.  You favor the flowers,

intricate poppies and lilies of the field though she assures
you bones do not symbolize death. Their lively
shapes please her as she props them against the big

blue sky West of the Hudson and rolls her eyes
at the men with their Great American novels and their
Great American plays.  She works red into white porous 

cavities and the windblown blue into everything unfenced.
Her black capes and dresses, her panoramic views contrast
the white uniform you wear on crowded streets to the hospital’s

rotating shifts that stink with disease or are fragrant with release- purged
of everything malignant.  You start to see Georgia in the crone-like
faces of your patients.  You turn and hoist them up in bed to keep

bed sores and diabetic ulcers from sinking bone deep. If you could
you would give them her money, her handsome companion,
her kick-ass character.

Instead you hang tube feedings and powder their support 
stockings before you work them up gnarled wasted legs.
You clock out, unlock your bike and pedal home.

Out on the porch, you smoke a clove cigarette, 
drink a dark beer and assign floral or bone auras to your patients.  
You look for stars through Mid-West humidity and think of 

Georgia on the roof of her adobe house calling coyotes 
sticking flowers in the eye socket of a steer skull—
liking the effect.

After a long bout of insomnia the artist
craves a dream memory—one with a narrative
and color screens. Her head is heavy with dense
material, her blank canvas waits for celestial 
release, her brushes stand tall and clean.

All winter she waits for birds to return. 
She needs to search for their cobalt wings
against spring’s green cover. The morning 
after the sap moon of solstice she receives
a twisted dream. 

She mixes the sky’s blue tint with its texture 
of vapor. The beaks of her creatures feed kisses 
of oxygen-rich air to each other.Their hollow sternum 
and curved rib lashes lift their undocumented flight 
to an altitude beyond miles. Dense leg bones lower

and center their specific gravity. She feeds their high 
metabolism with the nectar of foxglove. Their tiny 
porous skulls contain brains tangled with spider 
silk and greenhouse gasses. Wishes wait to be granted
feathers float toward hope on the edge of her canvas.