Whenever I see a sunflower I think of you. No matter where we lived, in the summers you’d bend your back to the earth beside our porch step and you’d raise magnificent flower beasts with their rough stalks, edible seeds, and gentle yellow petals, sometimes it seemed you cared more for them than you did for me.
Whenever I smell peaches I think of you. Not real peaches, but that dollar store lotion you would buy. You stopped wearing it after your sixth child, after your light grew dim, and we thought it died. I found an empty bottle of this lotion in the heaps of our rubble on yet another evicted moving day, its plastic insides held the smell of you before you started to hide. And in my garbage bag suitcase I hid your memory away so that I could find you again at the next place.
Whenever I cross a mosaic path it stirs an image of you breaking glass, pressing transparent cuts of colors to wet cement slabs, I would revel in awe of your art, your makeshift thrown-together crafts, and now I can not sit in a church beneath stained glass without your face replacing mother Mary, but I am no Christ figure, and you are not so Holy.
Whenever I see a drawing of the sun I think of your tattoo. A black flaming sun, eclipsing the spider beneath its place, chiseled into the bark on your back. Is this the same spider you saw above my cradle as I slept? You say it was a massive thing, crawling toward me, stopping you dead in your tracks. You say this spider popped into a puff of crystal spects, that you ran to me and saw nothing but a resting baby. It took you years to finally cover the spider on your back, but when you finally set the sun in its place you forgot color from your blaze and cut in the black. Maybe this is why I was born with embers in my hair, my locs are the ancient flame you lost from your belly. My sheath, my skin, pale porcelain, can only thrive when kept out of the sun’s sight. Did you tattoo yourself with this in mind?
This whole world reminds me of you. This is both good and bad. I could have never avoided your poison, less I were never born. You gave me nightmares and lost my heart in boxes every time we moved. You showed me bright colorful beautiful things, like the mosaic glass, I first saw you lay it out in patterns catholic saints would admire, and with the very same shattered frame you cut your face in front of me. That was a horrible scene, but it taught me something. That suffering and beauty can have a thin line between, that tragedy can become the art only I can bring. I know from you, my only true mother, that people are both good and bad, that the world is forever holy and evil all at once, and that there is nothing one can do to prevent casting great pain onto those we love the most, but of all these extremes and places in between the only thing that exists on every plane is the love we have for each other.

She had me in her palm, that sway of her laughing heart.
The sunflower of earth, giver of my life,
A peach scented woman, thick skin she’d cut open,
Hoping that the next passerbyer would heal her
Fill her with hope then,
She might know how to love me instead of shove me
Like a curtain,
But we didn’t have any of those,
Instead sheets hung loose over windows
And the world didn’t have to see in the home to know
That sheets are not curtains.
That a woman with six children hides in her room and
I’d never realized how broken she was
While I was too caught up in the whispers from the other mothers
They’d say “how unfortunate”
Then move on to the topic of sunday brunchin
I grew to hate them, and myself,
Was I trash? Can I be helped?
It’s all up in the air.
The air that never flowed through our sheet covered windows
And oh, my soul, I was there to see
The kind of woman they all thought I’d be,
I was there to see the real woman
Laying in bed at 5PM, hasn’t moved an inch
But her eyes stayed wide open.
There were times I thought she died
And I would cry
Because the relief sometimes outweighed the grief
And that’s no way for a heart to be broken.
I was a child then, my mother was too.
She is a child still and I’m now 22
I still fear who I could be, who I might be
If that grief should cease, let the light return to me.

At four years old I became a pyromaniac,
Set fire to the living-room lamp,
It was an experiment.
I wanted to see how difficult it would be for a flame to defeat me.
I touched lit candle to the dangly fabric bulbs hanging from the lamp shade
It bursted up, caught all the dust and the handmade paisley curtains
They too met the touch of physical heat,
And before I knew it, the corner of the living-room was a roaring devil.
I do not remember the heat on my face, or the melting paint on the walls
I recall a reflection of the monster I had made, glittering in my eyes.
I ran to my mother, she was shut in the bathroom
I called out to her
“This is the only time I get to myself” she shouted
With more apprehension than what I showed the fire
I told her the living room was ablaze.
The door busted open, and there was a woman, my mother
Pants around her ankles and a bucket full of water.
One douse was all it would take to ease the disaster I created.
Only charred walls and a destroyed lamp remained.

A few weeks later I dreamt of a fire, only it was the whole world on fire.
House half burned to the ground, I went to find my mother.
Opening the bathroom door I said softly “I’m sorry”
When to my terror there was a woman, pants around her ankles
But her body caught the fire, a skeleton mother
She spun her head and looked me dead in the eye
I shrieked and ran away and then awoke realizing it was a dream
Mother was okay, the world was not on fire, and I need not be afraid.
The memory of this dream stayed with me as I aged.
It is only now that I realize I could never set the world ablaze
It has always been this way
It is only now that I realize some people catch the fire
Turn to skeleton and ash.
Nothing remains, but
it is my choice if the flames should defeat me.
And I would be wise to not tempt the fire.

Anyone who tells you that everything will be okay is a liar.
Some things do turn out okay, but your life will be a series of good times, bad times, and hours where you work or go to school, fulfilling your obligations, and those times are dull gray, the get you through to the next stage.
Anyone who tells you that people are inherantly good thinks too highly of themselves, or else they hold tightly to optimism in order to avoid being a defeatest. This is a survival mechanism, and for them it is necessary. People are not good or bad, nothing is inherent. We are a mixed bag, skittles, M&Ms, and those puke flavored jelly beans. You can eat up or opt-out, but that is all we have on the table.
Anyone who is certain of themselves is a wolf, a self-proclaimed oracle of mankind, really they no nothing, and neither do I. We are better off being adaptive, and being comfortable with change and the unpradicatable nature of life. Live chaotically and nothing will surprise you but yourself.
Anyone who preaches God and salvation to you is a fool. But they are worth listening to. Fools love honestly; they only want you to have a life in the heaven they believe in. They mean well, they love you, and they are trying to do something good. Let them try.
Anyone who tells you they love you probably doesn't know you well enough to be lying about it. When you tell others you love them, try to mean it. If you hesitate or have to think about it before the words come out, then don't say it. Let love build and if it's too difficult to love anyone at any point, let it fade, you'll be better off this way.

There is a quiet anger festering inside of me,
a rage grown from trauma and pain,
Nightmares disguised as flashbacks
that torment me in the day.
Restless nights when I wish there were a God
who could hear what I have to say?
"You're kidding me, right? If you have the power to move mountains,
then why can't you lift away this weight. You made me in your image. Then why does my reflection tear at my ounce of strength? I guess that's it. Amen".
   And then I remember, you are the source of so much pain.
Tell a child they are the embodiment of sin.
Then suddenly, you morph to my mother's face,
calling me a creature, a rat, a good-for-nothing brat,
but I suppose I should forgive all of that.
It's done and over, but the words stayed in my head.
They replaced the space where love should be instead.
I do not trust the myth of holy wisdom.
I do not chase the love I was never given.
I haven't figured it all out,
and my anger remains burdensome,
but I do try to subdue the fire in me.
I try, to fight through my rage,
to remind myself, at 21, it's now up to me
I must discover my own way.
I try to remember the difficult days when I swore to the sky,
I can be better than how I was raised.
I can be better than a floating king that watched me wilt away.
My anger is an acid, and I would never wish
to pass on this grief to any other person.
The cycle can be broken.

Anger is an acid,
which does more damage
on the vessel where it is stored
than on anyone
which it is poured.

The forbidden fruit.
Grandmother Eve,
who shared her *****
with brother Adam,
and cultivated humanity
in incestiual Holy conception
We are a species cursed
by the bitten apple,
the result of their
Divine inbreeding!