Spindly fingers sporing,
Eyes boring,
Your voice dripped innuendo-
Nothing you liked more
Than a pretty *****
With a problem.

Your name a spell,
Mine a well—
Not whole but a hole,
Bottom dropped to hell.

You didn’t get what you wanted,
Only my death:
Gold threads strung me up,
Crown, cage, and child
All strands of the same
Choking mesh.

I wore it,
Strangled slow,
Dragged at last
To your
Rotting bed.

After Dad died
Mom taught me her sauce-
olive oil, garlic,
whole tomatoes I crush
like hearts on her cutting board.

I remember his palette,
cinnabar and vermillion,
while she screamed over the stove
and he disappeared
into the attic light.

She was an artist once,
before I lived in her body,
before she hemmed my dresses
and cooked her life
into someone else’s evenings.

“It was always this simple?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“I used to do it the hard way.
Like Nonna.”
Her eyes don’t leave the simmering ***.

Love left alone will scorch,
turn bitter on the tongue
of whoever waits too long
for someone to taste it
before it burns.

I burn my one effulgent hour
at a driveway banquet of unwanted goods,
listening to a woman in a Sag Harbor T-shirt
tell me her son’s wife hates her,
she never sees the grandkids,
and she’s moving to Costa Rica
because the dollar goes farther
and no one visits anyway.

Through my sunglass scrim
I watch komorebi flicker
across the varicose veins
of her blue-white calves
and wonder why I even stopped,
why I ask the price of a microwave
I don’t want.

Twenty, she says,
brand new, never used.
I hand her two crumpled dollars
for a box of yellowed greeting cards
with kittens and roses
and tell her my real name.

All the while
I feel the light through leaves,
the ache to bite your buttermilk neck,
to nip the chantarelles of your earlobes,
while the shadow falls,
reminding me I’d better love
whatever I am doing -
because it may be the last thing I ever do.

we should thank our mum for giving us our birth
carrying us inside then placing us on earth
then she had to raise us be our guiding light
read us bedtime stories so we could sleep at night

she was always there when ever things went wrong
to guide us through the bad times with her love so strong
so we should thank her dearly our best friend and our chum
thank her for just being there.  thank her for being mum.