Praying to the Plain Saints

If I had a son, I’d school him in Paris before he ever learned to walk.
I’d drop him off at the d’Orsay with a pacifier and a paint brush,
and we’d have flash cards, too: Moleill’s women.

If I had a daughter, she’d learn the beauty of lines under bellies and thighs thick as cathedral walls,
She’d be well-versed in stone-small breasts, the veins of blue marble, 
complete study of large-boned angels before she sang her ABCs.

If I had children, we’d come to Paris and park ourselves at the opera house,
begging autographs from mountainous sopranos.  We’d sit near sidewalks and talk 
about the marvels of softness, fullness, the foolishness of face cream.

My children would play I spy with neighbor ladies, map-faced crones being our favorite catch. 
“I spy someone beautiful.”
My daughter would grow up following curves the way some kids follow baseball.  
And, my son? He’d know his way around metro maps, café menus, Joan of Arc’s lone exposed knee.

Their perfect feet hardened on French cobbles,
their hearts awakened by kind muses and foreign babysitters, we’d sit in parks
admiring wrinkles on bone in the mornings and rolls of flesh after our 3 o’clock naps.

We’d oppose restoration projects on principle and discuss the merits of age with extra desserts.
If I had a son, we’d sneak in cathedrals and wonder aloud about the knob of Mary’s knees 
under her blue mourning robes. If I had a daughter she’d be unfit to live in a world with a judgment day.

This Ol’ Thing?

I wish I could wear my days like clothes—
the pregnant girl I saw once riding a skateboard
forming patches at my elbows

My left breast covered by you fishing on a muddy lake
Paris at my knees and Kyoto rains at my wrist 
like a broken watch

I wish I could slip on Rwanda,
sashaying like a skirt the moment I clung to the mountain
fearless as if the sky would hold me up

I wish I could adorn myself with the New Year’s Eve
we waltzed at a ball as if you’d never have that affair 
or change into the scratch of pencils on paper 
of a dozen schoolrooms
or the movements we made to turn from one side 
to the next again and again for 17 years

That boy walking alone in Alabama to his own graduation,
always carrying his black robes near my rib cage,
the apple smell of an old man’s pipe stringing itself like beads 
around my neck

I wish I could throw on a winter night in Rome
and wrap around me like a scarf every argument
we had in cafe booths in Alabama

LEILANI BARNETT

Leilani Barnett founded Write Now, an association for authors and poets in Dallas, Texas, and leads writing workshops in Dublin, Ireland, through WritingAdventures.com. She is an activist, teacher, and world traveler. Leilani’s work has appeared in English Journal, Perceptions Magazine, Raven’s Perch, and other publications.