March--

you fucking lion, you fucking lamb, you fucking heartbreak I wrestle to the floor every morning and all that mourning and it's been years now. I don't care anymore about seeming sentimental about the deaths that have wounded me most. I don't think that just because we live in a society that begs us not to dwell on sadness we can't allow sadness its due. March 22, 2004, my grandmother passed away, and it was one of the saddest days for me. She was my best friend. A year and two days later (March 24, 2005), my mother died. She was 52. Until this year, I couldn't even say that I missed her, which I've already admitted here, but I'm saying it again because I need to. She deserves that. In honor of my post-springbreak week--the week during which I'll occasionally nod to those two women who I miss, and a week just as busy with coursework and mothering as any other--I wrote this just now and have no real intention of changing it. It just is. You really should see the trees outside my window, the sky's vacancy.

Seven Years

& appropriately, there seems to be no sky

today, just those trees swaying in stiff praise.

Mother, what can I say? In the seven years

since those double-doors opened & I saw

that March sun spilling over the sidewalks,

I've seen it as blood, pooling in every corner

of every house without you. I don't mean to

be sentimental, to see our lives this one way.

Look, I no longer feed your grandsons meat

that isn't organic. I don't smoke anymore.

I won't drink beer unless I like the taste.

Mother, we both know that I swallowed

your vanity whole. I chewed your sadness

to bits. I've been choking ever since. You

can't imagine wherever or nowhere you

are how hard it's been to admit that sky

doesn't exist--those dark limbs, throwing

forward & raging back, like a woman still

in the throes of open mourning, waiting for

any hungry bird to bid me stay still, to land.

*****