Water runs in the same way she does.
Knowing they brought her gentle lies via guns
Barrels of bullets like music,
But they still wonder why she grew sick.

Salt dances on her cheeks and it is
Faulted for not one, but for all of the
Flowers that grew from her ears
In a matter of hours.

For the love of god,
Just skip the pleasantries.
Walk through the park,
Assign the guilt trip to your patriarch.
Pass the statues whispering ugly
Remedies in the form of an excuse.

I hide my eyes behind the hood
Let the light bleed through the thin
Fabric and the thick skin
That holds me.

I’ve grown accustomed to
The way it feels between
sharp teeth.
Digging into me
Is far too easy.

They let the wolf
Swallow me whole,
And now I will spend
Lifetimes in his belly.

Young girls on the bus compare knives.
New friends bonded by
The race to beat the school bell
And their parents.
One has blue hair,
The other, diamond earrings.

I hear them tell stories,
Diamond Earrings says she doesn’t have friends right now.
She did,
Until they all smoked a little too much ****
And another girl passed out.
Everyone runs,
Everyone except Diamond Earrings,
Who calls the cops and waits with the girl.
“I wanted to cry” she says to Blue Hair.
“I felt like a wimp”.

Sharing her fear,
Blue Hair insists that she isn’t weird.
“Anyone with a soul would want to cry”.
And I can tell that Diamond Earrings maybe hasn’t
Been told this for a long time.

They move on as quickly as the speeding bus.
And now they trade stories about the old men
That they recognize.
They loudly call them creeps,
Brave for each other.
Angry that they both have been touched
By strange men with gray hair on the bus.

I wish they didn’t have notes to compare.
And although it’s been years,
I still wonder about
Diamond Earrings and Blue Hair.

In early mornings and in the nights,
In the afternoon and the soft evening light,
Every cell of me wants you near
And I wonder if my whispered wishes
Can build and cross all these bridges.

I need to do the dishes.
It would take me fifteen minutes tops to do the dishes.
I would feel so much better with a clean kitchen.
I would make dinner.

-I would rather die than do the dishes.
-I could spend those fifteen minutes thinking about playing Pokemon on my couch.
-Not playing Pokemon, because that would require too much work.
-I would think about it, though.

******* just do the dishes.
We went to therapy and talked about this.
Not the dishes,
But about the millions of microscopic steps that everything takes.

-I don’t NEED to do the dishes.
-I can eat off this napkin or
-Maybe I just won’t eat at all.
-Everything is such a process and I hate it.

The first step is to just ******* do something.
Anything. To keep your brain from self-destructing
Over something as small as starting
Any and every task.

-I would rather rot on my couch
-Than do something. Anything.
-And maybe I would self-destruct,
-But honestly, it just sounds like too many steps.

I close my eyes so that I may see him in the night and in the day and in the light of the refrigerator. I walk through the hallways of time, rewind, and look into his face while I try not to cry. I hold the weight of this tiny world on my hip and bring her to him so that she may know that he saw her. The world changes around me, without me,  because of me. We are not real, you and I. You and her. Her. You. Me. Anything? No air but not for lack of trying. I draw circles with apologies, and I take the blame for you dying.

This poem is a response to one I wrote five years ago: https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2605739/in-which-i-am-brutally-honest-about-my-mother/

My eyes blaze with guilt,
and an outrage at being guilty.
No, at being wrong.

While I waited for the crows,
I was devoured by the chasm
between my father’s brows.
Felt my stomach drop
as I fell into the ground.
Even when I’m right,
I wish I were wrong.
But that’s just how it is to be the victim.

See, my mother was played with by god.
She’s quick to love only to be abandoned.
I remember her whispering to us,
in the middle of some nights
as if we were the daughters of Medusa.

My mother was hurt by god
She did not create sin but
she’s spent most of her life running with it.
Running from it,
running to it.
And I think at some point
she felt too distant to be worth it.

I thought I wanted to hate her,
but it’s impossible to deny her humanity and
to keep trying would only end in tragedy.
I know I’ve ignored her and
I know that worsened the distance.

I want to personally lay the burden
of how I love onto her shoulders,
tell her “You taught this to me.
I watched you love others from the mountains to the sea and I’m

sorry for the years I didn’t let you love me”.

But healing happened in a crockpot,
that wasn’t plugged in.

As a child, I felt so betrayed
because she was my favorite,
and yet I felt so alone
on nights when I couldn’t use her back
as my pillow.  

I tried to understand the kaleidoscope of her broken pieces,
and yet I wish I persisted as I got older.
I thought I protected my peace,
and maybe I did,
but it took me ten years to warm up
my shoulder.
I was sad about the absence,
until I became mad and indignant.

A case of unrecognized bias.
By having two drug-addicted parents,
and a lot of black-and-white thinking,
One had leaves, so the other was poison.
Two different flowers in the same garden.

And in that garden,
I’m weeding out the past
and digging in the dirt using only my hands.
Creating stability and forgiveness at that.
Forgiveness for my mother, who has grown despite my doubt.
Forgiveness for my father, for dying
at the hands of the devil he couldn't live without.
I am perpetually digging even further for hope.

And there is always potential for hope.