I remember my mom crying on the floor, Alice in Wonderland flood
from her tears. She was curled beside the bed unable to stutter a response
for my “what’s wrong?” My father carried a packed luggage to the bedroom door
hesitation only to turn and look. He beckoned my, wrapped me in his arms like a boa constrictor.
He mumbled that he wouldn’t be far.
He promised to leave something for me here.
And then he left.
I turned and ran to my mother, fingers like tissue paper wiping my face.
I remember the album on the table, The Highway Men ft. Johnny Cash,
collecting dust underneath my mother’s bamboo brush.

I remember a cloak of smoke wrapped around me minutes into a car ride.
Greasy hands scratch at the car seat covered in dust and glass.
The passenger seat now torn, chair stuffing protruding from its open wound.
“Daddy!” My voice was hoarse.
He came and took me away from the wreckage. He turned me around
and I could barely make out the white Toyota Tercel at the four way stop:
crushed into submission.
My mother came to pick me up and take me back to work with her.
After a glance back at the accident, just two blocks away from her job,
she hurried me inside the building.

I remember being dragged out of my grandparents’ apartment
a few weeks after the accident, the beginning of my father’s joint custody.
His grip was a bear trap on my hand as he took me across hallways
to what he had in store.
“I had to show you, Amber, exactly what’s in the sky.”
His finger jabbed into the blue where there lay a rainbow marble:
Pink Floyd’s album thousands of feet high.
My father relaxed his grip and clung to my shoulder instead,
pivoting me like a drunken soldier. “I bet you the cloud is made of Skittles.”
And he walked me back inside.