Fort

Imagine a barely two year old baby asking “what’s a cave?” 

I don’t know where the idea came from or when but when I arrived to the children I knew I had something worth sharing 

My floor length gestural print dress just grazes the floor

I rediscovered it at the bottom of my closet yesterday like a hungry fisherman hunting for a clam dinner accidentally unearthing a mud-covered pearl 

I keep stepping on the hem going in and out of the subway and the threat of my bare skin on that staphylococcal floor is enough to Pavlov’s-dog my hands to raise a lasso of my dress in anticipation of altitude change

But I have to take it off if I’m going to teach these kids the value of a fort 

The fisherman tosses the pearl for practicality’s sake-to eat or to greed-kerplunk-a marvel for another’s eyes-real value is in sharing

Being only two and four years old, I have to compare forts to caves if I am to push the project forward 

A hole in rocks? I’ve never described a cave so, naturally, the two year old’s eyes swell buoyant with alarm, “under ground?” his tiny voice and florid filling cheeks “What?” I’m in awe at how much sense that question made, because he hadn’t yet learned to love the dark, had no object permanence for air

When I was little I always wished for power outages 

I’d pretend the lights were out like all those times Ohio electric lines couldn’t handle a little lightning, they were so fragile and weak, thunder doesn’t scare a storm specialist 

A fort architect by trade, in each job I practiced an act of asceticism, a restriction for an alternate precision, if I could see less I could study more in the spotlight, that’s where I learned to get lost in the details, that’s where i learned focus is the path to beauty 

Creating material emergency wasn’t fantasy but the processing of urgency-Four years old, coast guard of chaos island and it’s easier to secure a battery than the tail of an emotion

i craved a space of my own, refuge in the loud overcrowding under a seven person roof

I built forts, safety-it’s what I needed in that midwestern house of distress

That house had a frame that was always shaking it’s drywalls until its own legs were practically broken

It was a house of building up for the pleasure of tearing down   

Splinters and the vengeful rogue tetanus tips of askew nails, I still find them in my callouses 

I was raised under that abusive frame, I would run home after school and fear would heat up chef Boyardee in the microwave 

sometimes I woke up in rubble not knowing how I got there 

I always sorted cinder blocks right away without even brushing the dirt off my face

Until the sun would run out and I’d sleep dipped in the orange lantern haze of my fort 

Today we built forts with the same fate as every fort I’ve ever built-“bed time” I’d scramble to push the couch cushions back to normal, my tiny fingers untying the knotted corners of blankets from the wooden slats of stolen upstairs chairs-the naive Penelope’s web, forts always get broken back down

The lesson wasn’t in the fort-I don’t know a thing about forts. No, I taught a lesson on permanence; it’s never in the product so no tears when our fort must inevitably come down. The practice of creation is all I know-I flick off the boys’ bedroom light

“goodnight”