i have watched the tectonic plates of your
personality shake and shift under the shadows
of your eyes for seven years now.

you are the child in a perpetual state of rebirth,
and i am the mother who weeps and mourns
and breaks dishes like a poltergeist.

i want to drink a bottle of cough syrup,
i want to chase spirits into traffic,
i want to throw myself to the wolves.

i can't shake the feeling
of being watched, even
in the dark lonely space
of my kitchen.

i've taken to wedging a
knife between my
mattress and box-spring.

keep me suspended in that dark water fear:
that moment before assessing an injury,
where everything is unknown and dire
and hopeful all at once.

i've spent many nights
waiting out storms, folded
away in my bathtub—

on the night that bullets
shredded through our
drywall, we held each
other there.

it reminded me of wind
and summer sirens and
the arms of my mother.

floods dredge up old
bodies from the brazos.

spring is the season that
gives the river gentle
permission to release
its dead.

they found a human
torso in a garbage bag.
they found a father and
son washed up on the
banks.

you opened me up
like a cold case file: hoping to find
something that all the guys before
you missed; hoping to make connections
with fingers following color coded string,
tracing who i've become back to who
i used to be.

you made our bed an
interrogation room, took notes in the
hollow of my throat, the crease of my
thigh, the underside of my wrist.

to your credit,
you never quit. but in the end you
had to be taken off the case; all your
hard work reduced to footnotes for
the next fresh set of eyes.