Like a wet séance,
tea lights lined the
porcelain frame of the old
bucket tub, as if the
closed-eyed occupant
within its liquid depths
was trying to form
a connection between
what is and
        what could have been.

One year since Chernobyl
erupted in your brain,
spotted like a favorite
sweatshirt in the lost and
found, it was snatched
up,
        up,
                and away
along with you and
who you used to be.

Brushed affectionately by
Death’s boney hand,
I wonder if anything
scares you
        anymore.

I wonder if I could be fearless like you.

Lips like shards of broken glass
like bittersweet Narcissus and
the remains of a once-proud Egypt.
A faulty cupid’s bow
a sinister smirk of Himeros—

I mistook you for Anteros.  A
simple mistake;
three letters off
three words lost in translation
a declaration with no apparent meaning.

New age romance, my dear,
is all for naught.

I could never date a smoker.

Flowers in the house don’t bring beauty,
      only death.
Aesthetically pleasing,
a platonic seduction that is
tempting yet entirely depressing—

I will not watch you die.

He never wrote me
love letters like
Heathcliff and Catherine and
all the other grandiose characters
in those old, Victorian Romance
novels.  In fact,
he never wrote to me
         at all.

Not a single word,
a single letter;
not even his name
on an otherwise
blank sheet of paper
roughly shoved into an
already used envelope.

Maybe he took my words and
burned them like my dog’s
ashes like Auschwitz and
Californian forest fires.

An abrupt end to
an abrupt start
created and destroyed
by the sure hands of God.  Mother,
you were never one for words.

I thought perhaps I’d
have a dream.  See
your face in the mirror;
feel your presence walk
through a door.  But
what childish hopes to hold
in the frigid face of reality.

Cold like the snow (you loathed to shovel)
like a can of Diet Pepsi on a hot summer day
(your favorite)
like global warming seasons
and the chocolate bunnies you
used to put in the fridge
(for Easter).

Cold like corpses
your corpse
six feet under—
tombstone in the sun,
no light will ever warm you.

Dearest mother,
I have not heard
a single word
from you in
over four years.

Dearest mother,
dearest mother,
dearest mother

what do your wings look like?

The inadequate bookshelf that sat near the door
that my sister used to call her own was
mostly made up of adolescent reads,
books better suited for preteen girls rather than
intellectually budding young ladies—
juvenile vocabularies and simple, non-complex
plot lines do little to craft and create
worldly, knowledgeable women.

I thought I must spring clean the
naiveté away and replace it with
the works of great authors like
Sylvia Plath
                        Simone de Beauvoir
                                                              Virginia Woolf
                        Margaret Atwood
Betty Friedan;
ingenious femme fatales that cut down
to the brittled bones of the misogynists
and burned their marrow along with the
ashes of bras and aprons and 350 degree oven heat.  

Growing up, to me, seemed like a wonderful epiphany
chock-full of ideas and opinions and
clever, ironic remarks that chased satirical witticisms
like felines to rodents and wolves to deer—
being an adult would guarantee me a say,
a vote
           prior 1920’s America
                                                  play dress up as a suffragette
           women’s rights
femininity personified by dolls in plastic houses.

To be eighteen-years-old,
the goal, the legality, the bright light at the end of the tunnel;
the official womanhood it would bestow upon me
seemed like something almost tangible
with the way that it loomed over my head.

Get good marks
graduate high school
travel back in time sixty years
meet a nice boy
become a “good wife”
have dinner ready by five
bear two beautiful heirs
clean up the messes left in the kitchen
fast-forward to the twenty-first century
go to a good college
find a stable career
settle down if the fancy strikes you
live non-docile and full of passion—
the parallelism of times are severely
di
    lap
          i
            dat
                 ­ ed.

1950’s America would never be a home for me
because I am much too wild to be contained.

the edges of his cupid’s bow lips quirked
up with the rising sun and I thought that perhaps
I had been shot by one of his arrows—
young love, young cherub,
how reckless we are.

slip me on like a sweater
I am your second skin
            let me protect you