A Force of Nature

Mixed greens. Purple onions. Banana

Peppers. Tomatoes. Avocados. Mayonnaise. Pepper. Sourdough.

A stranger knows

Your mother’s order, has seen her

From the other side of the glass where she is always

Right and a number one

Priority. Someone asked

How she was doing, how they could help her.

Chained in whose dungeon

Were you—whose good boy were you

Pretending to be—when she said please and may and I and have

For the first time? A stranger heard

The anticipating delight

In her voice you have nearly forgotten. Do you feel that

Knife in your back

Twisting, digging in? You betrayed yourself

For nothing. In exchange for her heels shuffling, scuffing

The linoleum, rising slowly

On her tiptoes like a newborn gull, divinely astonished

By the brine, that ax of air

Hacking, swinging in from the sea

As she leans in tempted, a tempest.

You got to live a life of the mind. Are you happy with yourself?

You gave up her hands, radiant

Bells in the highest tower of  her monastery, trembling

As she reaches to receive this moment

Made just for her

Because she asked, because she had

Paid the price: unzipping her coin purse for exactly

Seventy-five cents, counting—

Thirty two sense fifty fifty five send sexy five saints

Okay seven seventy won seventy true seventy tree seventy poor

Seventy five sands tank you—

Placing everything she had left to her name

In a stranger’s hands.

You thought your hunger mattered

More than hers, you were more important to history

Than your mother? The fuck?

She knows you hated her

Spaghetti—pack of noodles

Boiled, drained, dressed in ketchup

Hoarded from Burger King. Like a crown, you wear a stapled scar

From the previous millennium, playing hide and seek

In a hamper, finding yourself

And freeing  yourself—

Tumbling over—

Shattering all over the kitchen that took her entire Sunday to clean—

Blood everywhere, you blamed her for not being there

The first time and the second.

Your mother has not once not been the only one

Rubbing eucalyptus oil into your back

With a nickel. Her eyes holding back

The signs she saw, like useless currency, oceans eternally separate.

A mother. A daughter. You and her

Both bowed before the bodhisattva

Every night of  your childhood

To ask no more please don’t make me don’t bring me back

Here. Bound by debt, near death

As two bats in the branches of a beech in July, finding a way

Back to the cave, you and she are alike

In manner, mannerism, taste for a man

Who regards you less than muck

Stuck to his boot, kicking and kicking you. She knows

You insist she doesn’t know that you used her

Charcoal and Twisted Rose, smudging and scrubbing your face

As her car pulled in. Fuchsia

In Paris. She knew he hurt you. Irreverence. Because

She couldn’t do a thing,

She set you free. You’re the sparrow

Her eye is on. You tell her you love her. She lets you lie

Every single time. You only love you

The way she loved

Only herself, until she loved you.

In her car—key, ignition, engine murmuring low—

She chuckles, blushes

With complete incredulity, embarrassed

By her own incredible laughter.

She couldn’t believe herself. She amazed herself. Who else will?