I should have guessed I would always take to mourning like religion.
I swallowed the loss of my mother’s father inside her womb,
death sampling my blood /
lumped with absence. My futures bloomed in some prior-ticking heart

& I forget this (when it’s my turn to swallow the world)
I think it should show in some mark, believing myself
hemisphered & tectonic, wanting the bliss of tides,
not his emerald eyes, craving love but not the sapphire of morning song

while in a ruby-winged autumn, under my skin, a butterfly changes shape.
Why do I contemplate my life as if all my mothers
never sewed dreams into my eyes, as if all my time
isn’t a blade bleeding someone else’s thigh?

/

I’ve spent too much time in parking lots           I think
tasting tar           all I shouldn’t           my nails are never clean
who I would have been if I had Instagram at 13?            I miss
videos           &           presticking posters to my wall           surf wax sticking
to my           garden path           wishing my breasts were bigger.
The tooth fairy took my teeth but my mother hid
my molars          with her pearls          threading
my pupil through          her mother’s iris
whose death           planted Sahara
between           her daughter & granddaughter.          how to flood a
desert?            You can’t            which is the curse of alleles
and the sum of loss grief’s sweet weight
a haunting we shall go, a haunting we shall go

in this shop of horrors: where daughters know
their           mother’s mother             only in photos
only in second-hand memories          knowing she would have
loved you         only by the
echoes          in your mother
how lonely
is this:

calling someone a name when she is a stranger
when she does not know mine
when her daughter clasps her compact longing to touch
the face locked inside glass,
her scent less potent
each time it opens
/

like a mother a writer must have knowledge of necromancy
she must be crowned clairvoyant

In the old back room that my parents fixed for me, the one with the naked
bulb I thought romantic, where the paint chipped like old
nail varnish & the roving damp was hair set alight I watched my legs
disappear as if they were twin Disprins dropped into the fizz of a glass.
I’d lost my toes in Bangkok, on a winter’s day in mismatched pumps,
the air so thick it hurt to breathe, and then my feet snapped apart
in stirrups, moon-faced gynae & her no options (but to keep the baby
the baby. it’s just a          –.) My ankles went then, next my nerves,
on a plane between here & the DMC will cost you 20,000 Baht, maybe
after I don’t want to do this. By July my thighs were a soggy streak,
my torso an aeroplane weaving chemtrails, as if all that mattered was
the abattoir blade of my middle carving clean the meat off my bones.