I am getting progressively sicker. They did my weekly blood tests and found out my white cell count is in the red, way low as well as my other counts. Names I don't understand: A/G, Bilirubin, RBC, MCV, MCH, MCHC.

If I get too sick then they have to admit me which I don't want because there is a strong potential that I could miss the birth. MISS IT!!!

Found an intriguing local artist. Mentally working on the next series of paintings, using stencils to layer and layer, see what effect that has. Reading the short stories of Reinaldo Arenas and a crime novel by George Pelecanos and Jitterbug Perfume which my friend Yasemen sent me.

Working on a poem, but it's a sort of love poem and it gets a little too dreamy for me but Mikey, my ever trusting editor, says it works. It's a little too bleak. I need to re-work it.

Roots

1.

I brush the hair from your shoulder

Your bare back faces me

I lean back, afraid

To touch your skin

I could melt into it &

Hide my face. What

Will you be when your shoulders

Ease from their stern position

When your face absorbs the world?

When you turn around to look at me

Will you still breathlessly smile?

Could I have met you when my brown bare arms

Smelled of paprika and daylight? Would you

Have hit me across the face and pulled my hair?

I would have touched your shoulder even then.

2.

You put my hands on your hips

And walk ahead

My pebble eyes watch you

Slip into a waterfall

But you disappear behind a wall

I cannot enter these dreams with you

Dust rises up and closes me like a tent

My grin is swept away.

3.

We move now

With the trees

With the old ladies walking to get fruit

With the gangster boys bouncing in the front lawn

And their girls easing back into Cadillac leather

With the moths that land on our mouths in the middle of the night

We move now

You work in the salon

Eyes agape, lost hair on the floor

I move with the city

Spreading like an oil spill

Our children rain upon the concrete

And bounce back to our arms.

Underneath suns of every hour

We move with the trees to Cadillac beatboxes

And reach out to each other barely touching

4.

I pull your sweater over your head

And scratch the side of your face

I absently kiss your breasts

I look up with your face flush

And one streak of war paint