It was a recipe on wasp-eaten paper—
my grandmother’s old-school calligraphy
on a dusty box in the garage—
that did what a mirror never could.
I saw myself d i s s o l v i n g
slowly
held together by the grace of packing tape,
grown and in the garden
already withered,
yet awaiting
the unfurling
of something still
foetal.
This gash in the field
that every mother taught their daughter
to wash out with cold water, detergent-dried hands,
tracing the same paths from umbilical memory,
divots in the hardwood floors
paced between my bedroom and yours
and back, saying,
My little love, my little love,
the painful plea pressed
burning,
into my psyche,
Don’t hurt my child.
to which i thought:
Mother, forgive me,
I might be
already.
Just living leather embossed
by leather hands, scuffed
by carelessness sun-weathered
and stretching with use,
expanding
to hold the whole of you,
as your love, like blood, seeped forever
into the growing puddle of me.
All I could promise day to day
was one more
rotation
around the
drain
before I let myself slip away,
caught in the warm-water caress
and the knee jerk promise of I love you
said on a single breath, practised
though we meant it no less.
D i g e s t e d a n d in the wasps’ nest,
you waded out to meet me
when I couldn’t crawl back to you
on land. A rain away
from the wasp-eaten fate,
our words stamped like
b o o t p r i n t s
on hills that were behind us;
telling me
you love me, you’re worried,
you just want me to be happy—
till birthed a new day, when:
Mother, I smiled.
Mother, I might be.
