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Epistolary poem to my mother.

You broke a wishbone with my father nine months before
my birth and I am the outcome of the small trophy you
held onto when you lost to his larger luck line.  Sometimes
I wish that you didn’t make such a
sacrificial lamb of yourself.  Sometimes
I wish that I could dig my fingers into my skin
and rip out every single vein that looks
too much like pisces fish, like amethyst bracelets,
                      like rotting cadavers.

Mother, I don’t think that either of us have ever been
too good at doing what is expected of us.

You wild horse, you wild heart, you wild storm--
there is a lighthouse somewhere north
from here that overlooks the lake, and I can’t help
but marvel at the fact that you get to be the
light that calls us home when I can still see you
sitting in your locked car until the garage door closed.

(A hummingbird’s heart can pulsate
up to 1,260 beats per minute and now, I think,
so can yours.)  Your ribs
were not enough to hold your
tick,
           tick,
                      ticking clock
in one place.  Mother, your teeth were not
strong enough to hold your words inside--from you,
I have learned resistance in the witching hour;
from you, I was taught how to build a
backbone in the hour of the wolf.

You cut off a rabbit’s foot the day I was born,
but that foot was yours all along.  I am
walking around, trying to find the rabbit, trying to
give it back, but I fear that I am
falling down a hole my father dug with his bare,
          blood            stained            hands
years and years before my sister was born.
Sometimes I wish that you didn’t
turn my childhood into an enigma.  Sometimes
I wish that I could dig my nails into
every slipping memory, every unfinished story,
                      every last word,
and rid myself of the doppelgänger I found
in the looking glass of your bedroom.

There is a secret to being holy, I hear, but
I don’t think Jesus will share it with me.  I stepped
on your grave five years ago now and
I don’t think you have forgiven me since.

Mother, I have never been too skilled at
                saying, “goodbye.”