In passing, my brother says he meets
my father’s eyes
in the mirror every morning.
Asks me how you wake up from the kind of dream
where you’ve become the nightmare.
I don’t tell him I don’t know,
nor do I tell him what I do know -
that my face has become a collage
of our mother’s fear
and our father’s desperation,
his mother’s shame
and his father’s rage.
I see it in me.
I see it in the brother in my memories,
who sleeps in my bed with tears running fresh grooves
in his canvas cheeks,
clutching a pillow to his stomach as he snores
in soft, shallow whispers.

I will not join him.

Instead,
I spend the lifetimes of our childhood
perched in the dark at the top of the stairs
when the screaming becomes a weak echo.
My mother’s spine bends like a tree in a hurricane,
and in the dim light,
she shakes with sobs I can’t hear,
pulling glass from her feet.

I am told my father is a good man,
and so I say nothing,
not even when my mother flees in the
sweet violet hours of in-between,
taking the last of herself in the suitcase
she pulls behind her through the door.
For a month, she is gone.
Conjuring hope from air,
I transform into a magician,
weaving an illusion that
we are strong enough
to stand without her.
When she is gone,
I am also the skeptic,
searching anxiously for the trick
in her vanishing act.

The woman who returns to us
is a changeling with my mother’s hair and voice.
She is never quite the same -
the nesting doll with nothing left to give,
turning herself inside out looking
for lost selves
and past love.

And for the first time,
I stop praying to a god who chooses
not to hear me.

If there is a hell in this life,
then mine is in all the nights
I spent curled up on the bathroom floor
while my father became Kronos.
Ripped the laughter from my mother’s throat
and swallowed it,
only in this version,
there is no triumphant vengeance -
no reclaiming the parts of us that were
devoured so meaninglessly.

As I grow older,
I become a mockingbird girl,
defacing small kindnesses
with crude,
awkward mimicry
of what I know I ought to be.
I stumble over teeth and lips and open hands,
until I have learned to stay suspended
in the pain I’ve inherited.

When I am 18,
mother cries as we celebrate my birthday.
It is wordless - this understanding.
We both know that life is precious.
And fragile.
And fleeting.
And yet,
we would rather be matchstick women
burning bright and quickly.
Gone without ceremony.
Without lingering.

Breathing is the only anchor we know.
Our lungs are bound together
by these ribbons of history,
and they suffocate us equally as much
as they hold us together.
How do you unravel generations of hurt?
The knife is the heirloom they’ve left in my chest,
and I do not know if I will survive
if I pull it out and end this cycle myself.

Whose blood will be on my hands
when I sever these ties?