And birch limbs blazing with December sun as if they're in the middle of being born, engraved on the sky, grown over it, finger-fine, New English. 

And milk in glass dishes surrounding peach cobbler, in dining rooms where sumac drapes the lamps.  And streamers do, redly twisted. 

And my teeth, once.  Sleeveless dress over tulle lining, linen sheets stored in cedar and hemmed with decorative holes. 

White is also the color of snow when it's not silver, black, or clear. 

This too: old sheets, rust-stained, blood-stained, salted, at the beach.  When we twisted them around our bodies and ran in them along the sand, against the bared dunes's vertical sides, people stared as people will.  A strange dog followed us and his ears stuck out like flags. 

This too: at Yankee Stadium, new linen shirts attract spilling beer.  Fans of one side kill fans of the other and then all shirt problems are forgotten.  A young woman I know explains why she loves the Red Sox: "my great-grandmother is watching me from heaven and making sure I haven't gone astray."  

This:  fear dropping down, hot shroud, a blank that goes out to the horizon and doubles back.  Sometimes it's better to give in, shake on the street, pace, mutter, and look crazy.  But then it's hard to see things like the tiny candy-red, waxen, oblong buds of some bushes in Stuyvesant Square

                                                                             Liana Scalettar