patterns in sign language

Take the flowers the ground
gives you.

Little girl says thank you
to the dirt – gestures with her hand
from her mouth. Twice.

She throws kisses –
fingers from her lips then tosses them
into the breeze – goes wherever
the breeze takes them.

She gathers the pinks and petals in her arms
against her kid belly and

it's like a fever: warmth
behind my eyes and in my chest
well to tears in the ducts
grows to weak in my joints and itch
in my ears that can be fixed by numbing but is still
sensation and sensation's

absence.
The fever won't be gone because I want to feel it because it's a feeling because I feel it because I caught both unintended kisses because I saw them because I felt them.

It patterns like the kisses children blow
without mean to, like the deafness and fever
that grow because they started
for reasons less magical than the lies,

like flowers grow and little girls pick them.