Lilac

One look at the lilac, one smell and my childhood is — dogs scratching at the sliding glass door, bits of bottles coming up like grass in the grass, a dirty towel down by the feet of the tree, Lysol cans, small packets of Land O’Frost turkey meat — there in front of me in spring, in the wonderfully fat rain, flowering purple and whatever the pinkish purple is called and the white ones too. They smell like my siblings, like the backs of my infant son’s ears, like my son whom I would kill someone for. Before he was born I wouldn’t kill anyone. But now I would. And after I’d get a coffee from Starbucks, a coffee and a piece of that amazing lemon-frosted lemon cake and think nothing of it, and read the paper and hold him against my chest and listen to his body living, alive outside his mother’s body, and the lilac outside on the street, outside everyone, and heavy in the rain.