Letters to My Mother I.

Both my parents are deceased. I often write to them in journals as though I am just writing letters abroad or talking on the phone.

I came here as a Sunday morning,

too quickly

for your sleeping doctor to rise in time.

Your younger sister caught me,

in bare palms,

and you both laughed through awed tears.

She loves to tell that story, her

unpracticed hands

enough shield and cradle for two.

I do not ever ask where my father is,

or when he arrives to hold us both

because I also inherited our

hourglass wounds

from carrying a wedding bouquet

of someone else’s pain to my body.

And so if they want to leave, I let them

leave.

Mother, like you, I am threshold

and home.

The refuge in which they seek warmth,

and the uncanny stairwell they will

not descend.

Goodbye was, for the longest time,

surgery.

A gruesome extraction of that which

was embedded

inside.

But I know, now, that it is labor,

as it is through blood and love that

we are delivered to those meant

to hold us

Author's Note

Really and truly open to a constructive critique.