Inheritance

Mothers and Mothers and Mothers

I am tired of being

Born of hurt women

Again and again.

I have found I can hold myself

In my own arms, more freckled and less soft by the year

And can still contain the length of my stomach and legs

Within them.

Long enough now to cover my own

But too short still to wind around the

Basketed weave of theirs-

Impenetrable and more freckled yet,

Arms and arms

Of kind women who’ve fashioned themselves

My mothers.

I am spasming in honey’s, it is eating at my teeth

And sticking the skin of my lips;

I am gasping acknowledgments against it’s sugared veil-

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

But I am longer now in

Years and limbs and hurts

Of my own they tried to tightly weave against-

Be it by inheritance or happenstance,

I have made homes in my hands

And held my stomach closed, alone.

There is no need to toughen me,

I’ve been sanded by the same

Rough whiskers of men they’d

Warn against.

Maybe this is innate-

Veined through the arms of

Hurt and hurt and hurt women;

Taken root in me.

Maybe this is the cost of motherhood.

Still, I am older now,

And tired.

Knife Mother

my mother could open doorknob locks with her fingernails,

a swiss army knife of a woman in red polish-

I inherited her hands

like little cold spiders,

but not her fingertips

and I’ve been scratching the paint off of locked doors

for years.

the man at the gas station says I have her mouth-

we share drugstore lipstick like secrets,

wipe it off with the backs of our left hands;

I feel the coins fill my mouth

every time she bites her lip at the dinner table;

our jaws grow heavy

together.

she gives me her old leather belt,

she’d poked extra holes with a push pin-

there are still stains where she pricked her fingertips,

but only if you really squint-

it gapes on my waist like an open mouth,

and I breath easier

than she was able to.

how to join

(when you’re: young , alone , in your first apartment)

joining goes something like this :

It is warm and sticky and you’ve been walking uphill and the back of your neck feels like it’s dripp ing fleshy colored paint and so you lean against a tree for a moment to breathe . You lean against a tree and the outer bark you’re against becomes intangible ; you fall into the tree, standing vertically. The rough shell around you is now solid and your body is ringed into h al ves and th ir ds and thirt ee nths . Then, sometime later (you do not know how long, you cannot see through bark, no one can,) another person, with lungs (probably) heaving , leans against the tree and their ha lves and t hir ds and thir teent hs are ringed into yours . And you’re taller than you had been before , ensconced in the thick trunk, but less of your own parts, too . And then another person, perhaps tired from a jog leans into the tree , and another andanotherandmore untilallofyourhalvesandthirdsandthirteenths are pinched into the very tallest and smallest of branches. You’d think it would be very hot and uncomfortable sliding and melding into one another, but you are all very much so pressed together and thus are required to move very slowly . This makes you all quite cold. So cold , the boughs of the tree

tremor

and shake down their leaves onto the sidewalk ,

and the people that didn’t lean against the tree because they didn’t need to catch their breath (some people are just better breathers ) feel very much so bothered . So the city sends men to slice through the overhanging branches, and you can’ttellyoucan’ttellyoucan’tell if it’s your hurt or another third’s hurt, but you feel the blistering sidewalk against some

part of you all the same .