“My Mother to the Writer”

Who curves back her tongue behind her teeth

Twisting her lips to the side until they crack and bleed

Until gravity reverses itself and I’m pulled off the ground

Towards the barbed words laying latent,

Waiting to strike behind that mouth, her tongue

Wrapping its spongey, wet body around my neck,

As she whispers in my ear,

Spittle-d saliva landing like acid on my cheeks,

Leaving a burn where a blush would rest,

When I read her my work, she remarks,

I hope you don’t write

Like an angry woman

And now I find myself in a world,

In a home, where I use the word hateful and

Mother in the same sentence.

My mother to my writer

Spews judgment with every flick of her tongue

An uncoiled snake on the precipice of striking,

An inflection-ed statement a secret question

A jab, a sleight of hand pretending

To brush against my side

As the nails dig into my skin,

As her sharp, familiar voice

Pry's my mouth open,

My jaw cracking with the force of exposure

She peers in, scanning for someone else’s mouth

Someone else’s body she prefers

Someone’s voice who sounds more like her

Because who I am and

Who she wants me to be

Are two people who

Never meet each other—

They are strangers sitting across from one another

On a train with many stops,

The first gets off before I can even

Check the time.

The writer to my mother  

Cannot keep the words trapped in her mouth

They seize my body until it overflows from my lips

Like the sea foam falling from the gaping chasm

Of a choking victim’s last breath,

Dripping her derision down my chin like tears

Too heavy, too loaded to rest

Comfortably in the eye,  

Dampening the page until it’s translucent

Until I can hold it up to the light

Until my mother’s face fits neatly in the spot

Where my grief makes a window

Through the page, through me

Until my insides spill out onto the white

Nothingness of the page, until the words

Tattoo themselves to my skin,

Until she cannot hug me without feeling it,

Without retracting her hands from my body

Sullen, sick, regretful, repelled, as my

Words take me farther from the daughter

She dreamed of in utero

Contrite, calm, polished, polite, in that

She doesn’t speak out of turn,

Doesn’t curse in public,

Every “fuck” a pin prick against my mother’s heart

Every poem a pebble in her new high heeled shoes

Every strand of hair misplaced is another moment

My mother wishes she could turn back time

Re-mold a daughter out of pink bows,

Fox News, evening bible studies,

And Better Homes and Gardens Magazine

Until the writer becomes just a girl

And the mother just a mother

With grandkids and Easter morning church services

And no more poems written

By an angry woman.

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