After the school dance, your mother casts
her best bourbon into your face. The booze
hisses your cheek delicately, ice
diminishing against your outworn
nightshirt. Your friends redden,
their gazes collapsing over a neon sitcom.
At this point, your mother does not
know how her body is ending her,
her cells elaborating over & out
of themselves. Your humiliation is aortal.
Your friends slump wordless against
the couch. There is, after all, no language
for how shame belatedly frenzies
your mother’s mouth, how her eyes cannot
seem to find yours the next morning.
–
Her scotch finds her by evening, turning her
velvet & loose. Their screaming matches –
his hollowing against her, hers surging
against him – scrape together as you sleep
inside their diminishing circumference.
Each night you dream your parents
fastening into a single body, closing
softly one against the other – one
long, unmelting note.
–
In your last trip together, she melts
into your conversation, astonishing
herself & shining. She remembers
every word you say, responds with sensible
opinions. She even cracks jokes.
On that day, her glass starts & stays
empty. Her eyes remain cool,
water-bright in their shamelessness.
–
A morning stunned straight, bright
with winter, you refuse to work
your parents’ farm. Your mother
pulls off her workboots, displaying
her toes, permanently buckled
& yellowed from the iced bucket
that broke them years ago. Do it anyway,
her toes command you. When you refuse
farmwork again in the summer,
she chases you to the hayfields.
You run until the mud
is too deep for her to follow you out,
to gather you back to her.
–
When she sees the melena gathered
in the toilet bowl, she does not tell
your father. She does not tell anyone,
flushing her raw ink
down without words.
–
A fresh inkwell, your daughter words
her world into being. Night, she says,
eat, book, & just like that, the book
of night unfolds itself in her hands
& she swallows it whole. She remains
in no way a house wedded
to an unbreakable season. In this way
she, too, is unbreakable, though
you lose sleep over the terror
of her breaking form.
–
Days before your mother’s mind breaks,
she speaks into being fox, invisible,
snow, & a fox you cannot see spirits
the hayfield. These nights, you dream
her glass sweetening from the steep pool
of a zero-sum sun. Her glass may be
empty or it may not be. When she casts
around for its familiar circumference,
bright heat dances her hands.