[weapon, love]: When my eyes hooked around the knife’s
hilt, my mother detached her own face.
[associate, memory]: The pain ran off us
like cold. I keep her face in a drawer.
[insomnia, heritage]: Night is a loom. Night is a mouth. This absence
of light mothered my mother.
[exhale, witness]: What mothers me: local colour. Learned to replace bloody
with blinking as she cut into me, but her own temples bled.
[codependence, plum]: Underneath her face just a smaller, angrier face. It’s me
who applies the salves to broken capillaries.
[bathe, aftermath]: She has no idea where her face lives now. She washes her
porcelain ladies, rinsing suds from the bone-stiff ruffles of their lips.
[matryoshka, regulation]: She keeps her remaining faces stacked neat
as a deck of cards. Each new vessel encased by its ancestors.
[repress, lash]: Those unborn faces wait for a chance to perforate.
Lives are dying to breathe. They’d kill for it.
[terror, aspirate]: Her face presses against each sleeping visitor weighing down
my pillow. The night forces its fingers up their noses, so the air holes adhere.
[n, plus]: When they wear her, I do not worry about how many faces
their faces contain. The answer is always just one more.
[project, disturb]: They snore through borrowed nostrils. My mother’s mother
slithers in pinkish shadows along the floor.
[morning, integrate]: When the knife’s hilt is in my own hands, I put it down.
I consider gifting my mother to the compost, but my hands hesitate.
[lullaby, liminal]: I cherish it: that holy moment
of shilly-shally, the place where my whole life fits.
