leavening

I - butter

very well. I will tell you

about my second mother. I

will tell you about her landlocked

body & the white jewels pooling at

her bedside like spoilt milk. her blue

tantrums & electric smiles, honey I’m

just so exhausted you know? I know,

fourteen years of

living together is meant to have changed us,

eroded me & patted my soil into her body -

but no. No such thing, when i am an indulgence

she wishes she could quit, but no nicotine strips

or  10  months  sober  badges  can  rid  her of this.

II - yeast

what you need, my dear, is a good strong corset !ha

& I watch her mouth poison-darting, translate her

gingersnap & honey into a language I know. You had

a wooden dresser, didn’t you Mother, full of moth-eaten

coats & yesterday’s yesterdays. Naphtha balls reeking,

your pinked lips somewhere between mink coat & mink

coat. all i have inherited is a strange family, a parade of sly

widows, & she was the one he loved? your face is some

where here, I know, I just put it down. You on the seaside, or

on a cliff, in a shiny car speeding through an unknown highway

III - sugar

you were always too full of secrets. even when

your arm was more blood-drip than vein, you

told nothing. & your perfect blue nightgown

told nothing, & you told nothing. & from these

three nothings came me, or I, or the fire-ash urchin

or the short-lived beauty, or the heiress to the indigo

kingdom, palefooted & gone before you can say oh

all I can remember of you, dear, is your lack. It’s as if

my memory began only from the day you were gone. &

all those happy years he couldn’t shut up about were gone

& what was left was an open wound somewhere, and a child

motherless & fatherful clinging to your side. I wish you had a nick

name for me, a song you sang, a fairytale both of us knew by heart

but your voice, love, as a clock ticking backwards began to forget itself

and in my flesh I knew I would try and replace you with more mothers or

boys or clothes or sex. nothing changed. we went on planting the perennials

In her memory he said but i knew that wasn’t it

in my dreams you are made of dust or not made,

you are glass palace or thick air, old family heirloom;

guitar we hung on the wall and no longer play, pink heels

for Sunday bests that never come. your

caramel happening, your vanilla chest,

plumcake bodice & sugar tragedy. I make

a trail with your ash;

one that will mark the path to home.