mother to me

I wanted to smell like you.

When I was home alone

And the voice of my thoughts grew

Raspier, deeper,

When they sprouted their first stubbly hairs in the underneath of their arms,

I compared my own with theirs

And in the crook of dusk’s neck in that makeup-spotted mirror,

Sat upon the hardwood ground,

I took a few moments. I thought,

What would make this shell of mine complete?

And like a young child’s epiphany

I rose to follow the fog crawling through the crack of my closed bedroom door.

It held fragrant notes so familiar, 

So sweet,

That the scent placed your apparition before me…

Your gaze clutched me,

Molding my figure to the shape of your iris’s hands

So, with a panic brewing within me,

I gripped the knob with a raw eagerness born out of the blue

But the metal bit back:

A cautionary sting of several hundred degrees.

Wasn’t that handle designed to be relied on by me?

I have doors to open! New visions to see!

But if your dragon breath words taught me one thing,

It’s that a flame will creep where the air is vulnerable, innocently clean

And send its smoke to haunt one’s bones 

Until their writhing limbs are yearning for scraps of maternity.

And that was always your armor:

A master of a slow-burning ricochet; a pernicious weapon;

It’s the rejection of compassion and commendation of some heaven;

It’s a God that you pray to,

But a Daughter you’ve deafened.

Thus comes my retreat.

I hid under my twin-sized sheets.

But I just wanted to smell like you.

Instead I lied down, paralyzed and pondering,

What does a Mother look like to me?