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Last night I scalded myself Mama and as the boiling water ran down my arm
I saw you through the pain and you were smiling and everything was wrong
how you are alive and yet gone, how you exist and yet don’t, how I was never right
and somehow always mistaken
If I don’t come from you then who? My mitochondrial existence and all the women before us
seem to pass into memory and then detached, by our severing
every day I wake and I think of you and then I remember
you’re not thinking of me
What tenderized my heart so? Pounding it until it cried out
I know it’s futile and still I yearn
What compelled it to continue beating even after the obvious?
I loathe that about myself and I love that about myself
I am like a ship in a bottle, you cannot figure out how I came to be
full and whole, encased in glass and yet
I am neither full nor whole, but hungry and drowning
a featherweight, a word, something you created and then said
no you can take it back, I don’t want it any more
(I never did / I pretended / it was the mask of a mask in a mask)
and so I went far and nowhere
near and not close
wondering what will come first? The last loss of you, or the first diminishment of
my eternal want?
Who am I kidding? With endings there remain
more scabs to pick off, prayerful knees and bowed heads
no amount could achieve
forgiveness or whatever it is I need to be to
change everything that cannot be changed
so I watch myself and you
I watch nothing and no one
empty their expressionless pockets into water
watch the colors of us turn dark and indistinguishable
as if we’d never been and I am not sure
where or who I am without you
like a glass blower who stands on the quayside
wondering if
the boats will come today
marking the horizon with their
dusky forms