eterniss

      Summer— I wear bird spirits and fox bones in my hair, tend my thistle garden, bend and break my thistle stems. Grandmother says I am still a child, that my blue river deltas are small yet, have not known yet what it is to run over their banks. But I have known the pulsing flood-flow— my heart’s been overrun before, and she will see me one day soon as the summer I am, brown and freckled and aging, finally.     Grandmother— She raised me with her many words and stories; she says my parents had scarcely writ my name in the family Bible before they were gone, says I need to keep thistles in the garden to know w