Dear Mom,
I know I shouldn’t have been
snooping, but when looking
for some socks on a day when I was
still living with you and had neglected
to do my laundry, meticulously paper clipped
in your drawer, I found a 26-page document
that made my insides curl
when I saw the name of Dad’s mistress
printed blatantly on the front cover.
Yes, I looked through it
(and I know I shouldn’t have) and I don’t know
what made me more disturbed—the fact
that you took the time, ink and paper
to look up the woman who
destroyed your marriage
on public records,
and neatly annotated the highlights
of her messy divorce
prior to meeting Dad—or that this
26-page monstrosity sat innocently beside
his old Valentine’s Day cards,
still painstakingly arranged by year, mixed in
with your daughters’ decade-old crayon drawings
captioned by the loopy letters of a child’s handwriting
next to little plastic baggies with worn edges
containing baby teeth,
the roots yellowed by age and decay.
You never let anything go, do you?
You hold time captive by the wrists
until the soft skin bruises, and even when
it finally jerks itself away, you still manage
to sweep up every speck of dust
its presence
left behind, and store it
perfectly labeled in your archives
like some neurotic historian,
where you think your daughter, who was
only looking for a pair of socks,
would never just happen to stumble upon
this hoarded material record
of every ******* thing
that torments you.