Days pass like dripping icicles.
I never knew how to love you right.
I still think about Apollo,
And your DVD collection
And your eyes.
Part of me wants you to meet my son
Because friendship was never hard for us,
Only the messiness of dating.
There are so many things I hate you for,
But I still need to say sorry.
I was never perfect either.
You wreak havoc in my heart;
Breaths that take miles to reach me.
You are every metaphor, cliche, and warning-
Butterflies forced back into cocoons.
I do not want to love you anymore.
Being a mother is every cliché in the book,
And better.
But being your mother, Atlas,
Being your mother
Gives me hope;
Unbridled hope for the world
You will grow up in,
For the people you will meet
And the person you will become.
This universe needs you and it will try
To shake you up and
Hurt you,
But I will teach you to look it
In the face and roar.
I will lay out every avenue and stop sign I know
So you can navigate this world
Better than I did,
Better than my father,
And better than his.
Being a mother means
Looking at your face and
Wondering how someone so broken
Could make something so wonderful,
And it’s like suddenly every road of my life
Makes sense because
It brought you
Here.
Edges that reflect
The life I’ve lived,
Boundaries that tell
Where I have been and
Will no longer go-
Lines drawn
That cannot,
Must not,
Be crossed.
I used to live
Inside my sister’s house,
The way the dead live in
Our memories.
Not that I clung to her like spiderwebs,
But it seemed I gently refused
To be forgotten about.
I felt so loved, so cared for, so cherished
While I lived in that house.
My sister was (is) an angel that
No one I’ve met deserves,
Let alone this pile of bones
I call Myself.
I lived with her in New York once,
When I’d dropped out of school and
Thought about dying a lot.
I remember her telling me
Everyone Has a Different Path and
I loved that.
For the first time I felt like
Maybe I could still blossom
And still learn
And still live.
This past winter I wound up
Bound to her again, my womb full with a baby
And my life scattered in all these sharp pieces.
Her home was a place
Of real dinners and real laughter and real love.
And yet still,
I’d enter through the front door
And feel like a stranger; an outsider,
Intruding on a happy
Family.
Sometimes my past
Flashes in fragments like glass,
And to see with such clarity
Cuts lines like sharp therapy-
Am I better for
The beast I used to be?
Or is she still lurking
Inside of me?
Peach pits-
All that’s left
After the wolf
Devours the sweet
Parts.
Bruised breasts
The word “thick” stuck like
Nettles on my tongue
My brain playing the memory
Over and over and over
Until I start to
Burst
Some Italian phrase
Sits on my tongue
And I am so stuck
On its beauty that I
Cannot remember
What it means.
It’s all about execution;
The words come out and the
Guillotine becomes less monstrous.
