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.
I’m not myself when I’m not writing. I become the shadow of a soul that breathes for the expulsion of words. My fingertips cannot keep all the things I have to say stored away, and if I wait too long the words come spilling out of my mouth instead. It is dangerous to be a writer.
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.
I am looking at photos of my body; mutilated. A police officer is showing them to me, telling me what happened and I can’t believe the body in the pictures belongs to me. Patches of skin have been cut off my chest and my flesh is bloody and bruised. He is telling me I was hurt, all over, very badly, and that they haven’t caught him yet.
This, this is the real fear underlying all else: that I was not safe and I could not be. I rushed to all the doors and triple-locked them and I was so paranoid; checking and rechecking and looking out windows. But he was out there, and he was waiting for me and he had hurt me; he owned me now. No matter where I went, or what I did, I knew he would be there. And that feeling has lingered in my chest all day. Sick with fear and paranoia. He was so much more than just a figment of my imagination, he was a culmination of everything I’m most afraid of. And the way I felt him was like the blood in my veins; warm and constant. I did not have to see him to know what he looked like or be in his presence to know he was there.
At first I felt nothing, which
You know I never feel.
I seemed heartless, I was cold.
I know how I looked to you, I know how you felt.
I lived inside that nothing and felt blessed by that nothing and at first, I was safe.
But memories started invading like
Nasty little soldiers, pinning medals to their chests for
Every knife they put through me,
And dear,
They fought so valiantly.
My heart no longer feels nothing.
This is being exposed, shell upside down, soft pink flesh turned to the sun.
This is the real pain, the
Hurting you.
Compelled Perplexity 