You broke a wishbone with my father nine months before
my birth and I am the outcome of the small trophy you
held onto when you lost to his larger luck line. Sometimes
I wish that you didn’t make such a
sacrificial lamb of yourself. Sometimes
I wish that I could dig my fingers into my skin
and rip out every single vein that looks
too much like pisces fish, like amethyst bracelets,
like rotting cadavers.
Mother, I don’t think that either of us have ever been
too good at doing what is expected of us.
You wild horse, you wild heart, you wild storm—
there is a lighthouse somewhere north
from here that overlooks the lake, and I can’t help
but marvel at the fact that you get to be the
light that calls us home when I can still see you
sitting in your locked car until the garage door closed.
(A hummingbird’s heart can pulsate
up to 1,260 beats per minute and now, I think,
so can yours.) Your ribs
were not enough to hold your
tick,
tick,
ticking clock
in one place. Mother, your teeth were not
strong enough to hold your words inside—from you,
I have learned resistance in the witching hour;
from you, I was taught how to build a
backbone in the hour of the wolf.
You cut off a rabbit’s foot the day I was born,
but that foot was yours all along. I am
walking around, trying to find the rabbit, trying to
give it back, but I fear that I am
falling down a hole my father dug with his bare,
blood stained hands
years and years before my sister was born.
Sometimes I wish that you didn’t
turn my childhood into an enigma. Sometimes
I wish that I could dig my nails into
every slipping memory, every unfinished story,
every last word,
and rid myself of the doppelgänger I found
in the looking glass of your bedroom.
There is a secret to being holy, I hear, but
I don’t think Jesus will share it with me. I stepped
on your grave five years ago now and
I don’t think you have forgiven me since.
Mother, I have never been too skilled at
saying, “goodbye.”
I wrote this for my poetry class.