Provider

I had been fighting it all day. I'd wanted to cry from the pressure of it all. Here she was: the heavy on my chest,

a fast hole burrowed into my heart...

I am tasked with providing the sustenance for her body, but more than that, there

is the thing that keeps me awake; that I must give 

deep love 

from my human well. 

It will never be enough. 

Lord, help me.

Good morning, daughter

Good morning to you, daughter. 

Your eyelids open, and your limbs relax and tense.

I am aware of every twitch and roll, every slide of the eyes.

The sun has risen after another night of spit up and tears. 

You are a gratifying soup that I don't know all the ingredients of yet.

I hear you.

Speak, girl, speak. 

Flashes

Hanging onto plastic: pinks and yellows and blacks: the silky stream, highlighted by the store’s spotlights…

I could walk in there and make my winning purchase: something that will cover

marks spreading across my white Irish/English skin…

Sometimes just being here, observing the crawling and creaking of humanity is enough: the children who run with purpose to the spider on the sidewalk or seeing inside the farmhouse that serves as the center of the night’s starry sky.

But oh the fluorescent, how it lures you in like the two-headed lamb at the carnival.

Meanwhile, the bird’s wings close and open. The old woman’s walker wheels to the family table: last conversations happen.

But I am clicking the flashing x’s on my telephone.

And I am breathing, yes?

I am breathing.

Underneath

Under the bed, their eyes made of beads stare at the wood
and the form in the mattress.
She shifts: once, twice…
Nightgowned and small,
she emerges from the bed, looking for her father’s brown
eyes in the mirror. Gladly, she sees her mother.
She grabs a doll from underneath and looks into the reflective blanks.
She places it back under the bed and finds the space
most comfortable on the mattress.
She doesn’t want to be watched anymore
by children made out of plastic and cloth.

Humanity

Cigarette smoked: circles in the January air from her red lips, she made a wish for
the blessings
bestowed to her,
but instead she is the
black lungs.
When the meals are eaten and the tinsel crushed from the fall from the plastic bin, we stare at what is:
And your sovereign hand, dark and spiraled, twists the bronchial tree, so we breathe for more.