I used to come home late,
my eyes rimmed
with sleepless nights
and my cheeks
stained with tears
and I would tug at God’s sleeve
and beg for help
and he would say “later”
but later never came
and I swear that God
reminds me of
my mother sometimes.

Colossal wings of striking,
soft white feathers
erupted from her pale shoulder blades,
divine and substantial.
Wings.  
She had wings.
She hated her wings.
Daddy used to call her
his angel. But she knew
she was no angel.

Behind the house with the fragmented windows
and the corroded pipes
and the cobwebs and ages under the stairs,
she buried herself
under the earth and grime
until the roots contained her decayed soul
and encased around her brittle scarred limbs.
Until the dirt crept down her windpipes,
until her tarnished lungs were suffused
with ashes and dirt.
Until roots replaced her veins and
smothered her cracked ribcage.
Behind the house with the fragmented windows,
under the grass and gravel,
that was rougher than
her mother’s dispirited retorts,
where she once capered and skipped, and never thought
would become her grave.
By the ethereal creatures she played with
in her younger and more susceptible years.
Dig up her bones but leave her soul.
Who would ever want cruel contaminated beauty
as a periphery for such a fouled soul?
It was when she stopped falling asleep on the way home,
when her nightlight ceased to make her feel safe,
when a lover’s unlawful kisses replaced her family’s amity,
when a lover’s lethal passion parted her lethal loneliness,
when home became a person and not a place,
was when she buried herself
behind the house with the fragmented windows.

Hurricanes erupted in my lungs
when the tips of your fingers
touched my jittering skin
and I am still sorry
that I wear my father’s disappointment
in the expensive black lingerie
you’ve seen me in,
cold and bare
with goosebumps blooming
on my brittle skin like braille,
and as you touch me
I start apologizing
for the broken home in my eyes.