a bowl of black beans / your mother sitting on the other side of the kitchen / this liquidation of self / you would be something / anything / anyone / if it could make you safe / the black beans taste like nothing now / you aren’t crying but you’re **** near it / your mother makes a honey sweet remark / won’t you stay alive / and / eat your beans then we’ll leave / and you don’t have an answer but you listen / you are pleading with the voices to let you eat the beans and make them taste less like bleach / your mother bleached your hair when you were fourteen and you bleached your skin at sixteen / you drank that same bleach from that same bottle three days after your sixteenth birthday/ but this is a bowl of beans and it tastes like that time / smells like that time / your throat coughing up blood and your body wretching to *****.

a bowl of black beans / your mother takes that bowl and washes it out in the sink / you still have that hoarse voice from imagining it tastes like bleach / you still have that ***** wretch instinct because of how much your throat stings / then mother says; you’ll stay with them for some time / as if that makes anything better / a drive into the emptiness of a psychiatric hospital / a place they’d sent you when you were ten because you were so angry and so depressed / you break when the blue tiles turn to ocean and you drown / you break when the red tiles turn to fire and burn your toes / you are hungry again / but you know everything you eat will taste like bleach.

you can’t sleep because the bleach is still on your tongue / you think of that bowl of black beans / your mother sitting on the other side of the kitchen / maybe you’d see her smile again / maybe you’d be broken and be able to exist comfortably / don’t you want to survive to see that?

you answer / no / i’d rather die than be patronized.