My
daughter killed me a in story yesterday. She beautifully orphaned herself next
to an unfailing father. She then crumpled the paper and tossed it behind her
desk in a corner, next to a ball of socks. There is a problem you might have someday,
baby. Mothers are known to bulldoze their way into mind and heart alike, their
absence, ripe as heavy fruit. My own mother, gracefully haunting every room,
the humming of her cracking bones, body thinned with worry, a buzz and cackle
when our live wires touch. Behind the open windows, this clandestine sun, a
gaggle of Sundayed children and your desk is begging for more paper and pen,
eager to feed your thirst for
unbinding, untying, unawares it takes a daily slamming and slapping of hard things
to occupy the present before crocheting an unravelling future. But I am ready
to gift you a thousand deaths, baby,
should you need me to untangle the stiches on my belly, one by one, until no
bad bloodies your dreams, baby girl, let mother milk run your veins and cocoon
your breath, I am here to stay.
For a while there
You called them pet names and lazed
around midday, nibbling on pretzels and apple bites, hands, eyes, breath
shaping, crafting, weaving. A mother’s heart, a zipper, done and undone, can
make all sorts of things fly, a sigh, a kite, a balloon, time. You can save no
one past a certain tilted smile. Off go the braces, next a different kind of
metal befriends the skin, some human blur collapsing inward from the touch. For
a while there, you had them bleed in your belly and they were yours to hold.
Everything is made of labor. Even little explosions called Sasha or Mihnea.
Gifting
A
mother has a crystal tongue, the spinal cord of worry exhausting all her cells,
an animal flicker in the eyes, a whisper for every cold nose, the petalled
touch of a cactus flower, when my turn comes, I scar her from the inside, you
would think this hardens the heart, instead, she’ll carry my name on her lips,
between smile and quick breath, for thirty more years, one day the wind blows
her into a new shape, a kite we fly to appease the absence, when my turn comes,
I wiggle my toes in my socks at night to chase away the numbing pain in my
belly, next a succession of leavings, little deaths or explosions, a son
tearing up flesh to grow flesh, a daughter exhumed every year to appease guilt
and hang desire by the throat, eat your fill, cradle those hungers, says
the man who tries to shatter every sliver of my tongue with his metaphor-laden
teeth, a mother knows how to open her mouth into a snow globe, every soap flake
into a boy, girl, poem.
That
time I got sick
I
slept for twelve hours in a row
and
dreamt we smuggled scrapings
of
ourselves into feather suitcases.
Where
are we going?
your curious
eyes,
denuding the morning skies.
Other
than the length of this warm
bed,
the flawed metaphor is my next
favorite
thing, that little patch of
quicksand,
and my mouth begging
for
momentum. Behind the curtains,
the
day boxing light spills, October
sun
gamboling in the dry grass, say
you
are ready to slumber back into
hunger,
and I will hold this bird
of
a poem inside my chest, feed it
from
my atrium while you wrap
your
heart around my naked back,
let
them dizzy worries skirt around,
sometimes
we don’t die when the day
strikes
but before the hand comes
to
measure the unaccounted hours.
Algorithm
with broken search
The
vibrating muscle of a Richardson day.
First,
in the early oat milk single-shot venti,
later,
in the conversational code-switching
Haide,
vino să
bem another coffee împreună,
it
is the little things that whop away the stupor,
the
jellyfish stinging of dor in every aching cell,
more
coffee soothes, a murumuru butter burgundy
for
only $ 2.35, on sale, living on discount joy
in
the Marshall’s heaven, measuring unfamiliar faces
always
smiling, never catching a glimpse of the bird
in
the throat, sewing butterflies with a clenched mouth
while
correcting rhetorical papers for nineteen students.
At
night, a splinter of moon, eyes chasing shadows
in
the small room, a frijoles scent seeping under the door.
Clara Burghelea