tethered like a tornado:
© Faith Mingus

here, tether your horse your snake your cat your mouse all to the same brigade and bridge. make them sit together there, a family, a sham. bring out the camera saying one two three cheese and poof lights smoke illusion. you're missing from the picture though, smirky, mirthy, mellow. i read an essay once about family storytelling, passing things around like the mashed potatoes. clockwise or counter? we always pass like a pie, diagonal and angles. more haphazard and holistic than on a rotating, perfect basis. i always say storytime in the calmest of voices. you flock around and sit at my toes and play with my free fingers, three stories long. the nails are the windows, you can't see anything but purple, pink, white, dirt, rainbows, denting crescents, and dawn. the shades must be drawn. the knuckles too tell a story of crackings past, of the shifting of age and memory and ball joint socket rotating bells swinging in the treetop of the steeple. people always gravitate to my thumbs. pressing forefinger and thumb to either side and tracing the shape, holding the top, gazing laughing liking. others have broken fingers where whole ones should be. wrapped in blue and bruise and purple (like my nails). you laugh only because it's the middle one where foul gestures come from. and when you eat your burrito beautiful out comes the broken one and the broken one alone.