New Mexico Mercury

Editor's note: These are actually two separate poems that have been paired for this publication.

I never hurt nobody but myself and that’s nobody’s business but my own.
-Billie Holiday

The Mother

I haven’t written a poem in your likeness for some time.
I tried.  I took the broom and beat the cobwebs.
Lit one hissing cigarette after hissing cigarette,
Let a dish fall to the floor, a porcelain scream.
I let the quiet shattering happen but could not eek it out.

Then I thought of this. You the young mother,
a knotted belt at your waist, slim and attractive
in photos.  Your teeth gleaming and straight
like a string of pearls.

You hosted one birthday party in honor
of me my whole life. I was four years young
and it was a California Easter Sunday.
The kind of Sunday people move to the West Coast for.

You drew caricatures of rabbits and fashioned
yellow tufts of baby ducks.  Dressed me in
my best cut-off jeans and plaited my hair.
Posed me in front of the cake, the cousins,
the wrapped gifts.

Picture after picture reveals that I was happy.

Mother, you were perfect as a plum then.
Slicing the cake. A knife just a knife in your hand
and nothing more.

I am now ten years older than you then.
A whole decade and more of misdirected men
have come and gone for me, a daughter
of my own. Many birthdays since
that I care less to remember.

And it took me this long to notice
the one thing missing from those
Easter photos that long ago day.

The father.

The Daughter

The evening that I notice my girl is changing,
sprouting with hair into womanhood
I see crisp lines like small black lightning
erupt from the inverted spoon of her left armpit.

The heat presses against the window like a boiling
summer monsoon and she is a sweat tangle
fast asleep on my side of the bed.

The butter pallor of the reading lamp permeates
every corner of my bedroom illuminating
sweat beads that congregate at her temples.

I sit awhile and watch her.

One arm is thrown above her head as if
she aims to catch a pop fly in her unconsciousness.
The other arm pressed to the small bell of her rib cage.
The arm is a small branch a bird might perch upon.

The chest rises and falls like a doughy bread.

This is my life’s purpose,
monitor the breath, the hair
that takes to her legs like
a brush fire across California
summer hills. To move the
lithe body from one bed to another.
To notice the faint shadow like a dusty
charcoal above the lip.

I know her body like I know my own.

I am prepared to be prepared for this shift,
this inevitable change of
the cosmological order of her being.
I am her ordained keeper of body.

And it is when I know,
that I must let go
that the real dying will begin.

That mother and daughter diploid cells
will have truly separated into their
own acts of insular creation.

That I must step away and watch
from the light house that all old
mothers retire.

Now, I hold the golden meiosis
of her body close
this sweaty sleeping girl
who almost slips through my arms
and walk out of the buttery light
of my room and into that greatness
of the long dark hallway.