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.