Summer beats
down on me
owning the sweat
on my body
the kind of heat
you equate to distant memory
sweating and swearing as mother
attempted to beat the blasphemy
out of me.
How fitting that now,
I should find myself baptized in a lake by the place
where she has wrestled
a mortgage into a home.
Her hands grabbing at digits
from her master the banker.
My hands reach down
sifting through debris,
brush
and
discarded
cigarette butts
all for a stone to cast into this baptismal bath drawn by mother.
While the only memory of my father is him teaching me to skip rocks.
Smooth
oval
in the wrist.
My record is 7.
A much smaller digit than the ones that concern my mother.
I see myself in the seven.
Gliding,
bouncing,
resisting
then
sinking.
So I wonder,
from this place
where I peer out of my
tiny
human lens;
How much of my wrists
can make my heart skip.