My mother wants the dead to go away,
tired of how they pop up among the list of the living,
in whatever the last profile picture they selected
not knowing it was the last.

how she stays silent the whole time. 
Her eyes are closed and her lashes fan 
out across her cheek: 
I decided that this is what religion looks like. 

In the bar, Miss Carey’s song on, “Honey.”
If you were ten years younger, had no kid

wee’d still be smoking along the river,
watching Frogtown ducks swimming in the dark.

watching the boys whiz past, skating into
each other like awkward buffalo; wanting  
to talk about the boys; pretending you don’t
want to talk about the boys; double checking
your makeup; going to the snack bar for nachos

Yellow now and higher 
on this straight stretch,
it moves as strangely
as you -- wheeled home 
the last time, your left hand
grasping for my right.

Most of the time, the chick eats. Then 
grows. Eventually flies to another’s 
nest, still incapable of affection. 
Like she knows she is adopted. 

And the Soviet Union sent a probe
the length of a broom handle 

to greet her, held together with sugar,
like our intentions 

could be a candied-coated,
our banishment licked clean 

I shouldn’t talk about the throbbing, finger condoms,
the high of pain relief.
Like, as a married woman, 
I shouldn’t talk about my first love’s. 
backseat overdose. The droplets 
on the window, the smell, his bloated body. 

When she handed it to me, brown and bulbous like an onion, I didn’t expect it to juice with perfume at first taste. A kiss from the pink mouth of a flower grown inward.

I, ever rational, handled my alcohol.
I took what I wanted; sovereign,
stoic.  I marked my boundary lines.
I was one of the guys.

To this day
I'm swifted back to those lean,

hard-drinking years by the scent
of cigarettes overlaying the spicy musk

of still-crisp, newfallen leaves,

The breeze passes heavy, carrying
the guttural voices of the daily dwellers.
Their ingrained presence never redeemable,
fossilised within the billboards and bus stops,
which cradle them each evening. They never
seem lost as long as they remain within these
stretched parameters.

his mother thought
he would be as tall
& violent as his father,
but instead his hazel
eyes softened into the muddy

brown of a warm
house inside a cold
window.

I call the urgent Nespresso line, 
whose appointed representative
reassures, as I wish our leader could—
they understand the crisis

(How I policed me. How I cuffed my own hands and bound my own feet,
            shuffling about in my orange shame, sitting myself down in my cage.
                        Scratching prayers into the cell wall, which my own nature answered)

On day 3 of the binge, I dragged
her favorite bookcase to the lawn, shook
a can of gasoline over the wood and gazed
as the flame stole across the shelves.