Wearing Pants in Arizona

Ky Klassen

I keep waking up to new bruises on my body–something I’ve always noticed on my mom.  As a kid I’d trace their map, arm to arm, leg to leg, to follow to find and forge a way to make her love her. 

No one told me that when snow melts, it’ll freeze, and I’ll fall and bang and bruise my body. I never wanted to be one with the water cycle until I saw snow and evaporated for the first time last winter.

What they don’t tell you about this certain season is that all the flavors either migrate or melt away. I was more of a vanilla person anyway though; the other option would’ve made me more reminiscent of her.

Wearing pants in Arizona, I can see the heat’s wave in the sky, 110 dousing down above her.  The mythology of my mother’s legs made no perceivable reply, no chance to love a hypothetical part of her. 

My favorite color constantly changes, black and blue and green all on their way to a glossed over gray.  Without a treasured tone of her own, individuality was the one and only child that had been deprived of her. 

I’m starting to wear shorts less often, it’s hard to find a pair that fits and feels the way that I want.  No one tells you your hips get wider, shorts get shorter, and you’ll look like that one photo of your mother.

The one where each time you look the glare gets bigger to cover her clothes that are smaller that I’m used to and the faces fades faster until it doesn’t even look like her, but some version of her own mom or her sister.

Left to its own antibodies, my bruising branded to a scar; though I kept my legs covered completely.  When I walk past, I’m careful to only touch and not to taste the fatal ingredient found in a daughter’s foxglove: her.