my baby girl:
both your mother and you are 22-year-old women
at some cinematic cosmic intersection in nonlinear time

brushing our teeth in public bathrooms,
falling asleep next to fat men in the 37th window seat on planes,
slowly calling home less and less often as we finally
learn to tell the difference between cooked and raw chicken,
wishing we were much younger or much older--
just please, God, not this messy, half-baked, 3am drunken monster in-between

I don't know who your father is,
but I may have an idea -- my boy is no
Hallmark movie star but he stayed with me
in my college one-bedroom for two weeks to
give me medicine and baths when I
couldn't breathe without pain,
he always calls and he always comes back, which is
much more than I can say for most men.
and I know that he'd do the same for you,
which is why I wouldn't be surprised if we married

anything borne of my being will certainly have
a sailor's mouth and a fire in her belly,
and I won't apologize for that, but I will apologize for the
men you scare away with the boy-cut, shoulder muscles, and 6-inch blade in your pant-pocket--
even with tails between their legs they make me crazy,
crazy because they tell me
the womb that will bear you makes me weak,
makes me a doll, a pretty little thing,
and I let them
convince me that you, the existence of you, is my failure to neuter myself numb,
to be great,
my white flag, my conviction and the disintegration of my
mask of competence

if you are reading this,
my daughter,
you must instead be my greatest victory,
proof of my strength and my sacrifice, my selflessness,
proof that the men in this world have no knowledge of us,
and every person that I have been in my life
is now for you, is part of you, and has loved you.
I love you with bearing grease underneath my fingernails,
mud in my mouth, and a 6-inch blade on my hip,
I love you with daisy chains on my wrists singing showtunes
at a bonfire by the lake.
I love you in heartbreak and in pain,
I love you in fury, and in comfort,
I love you in the safe embrace of the man who may later be your father
and I love you with the love my mother has for me

we will both be gone at some other intersection in time
but the love I have for you transcends our mortality,
and is already etched into something beautiful and beyond

my bones that have now carried worlds
are frankensteined bits of shells and shrapnel glued
together with calcium paste
and slathered in blue dye
to make everything look new---

I was so whole.

I have now already fractured
in every predictable place,
re-engineered and retrofitted my consciousness with
seismic dampers
and levees

and I am so strong, now.

how does it feel to know that it was you who broke me?
there is no one---
not even you could do what you did to me
again

and it feels good to be a god but mostly infuriating
to think of the fragile thing I used to be
for you, when you knew me.

I haven't seen a waterfall in 4 years,
my re-grafted skin has lost all its electric-sensitivity
and my heart still pumps blood but I reforged my arteries into metal,
which keeps me alive better than before but I
don't remember the last time I
felt anything.

someone took a pair of scissors to the sky today,
the way the light burst through a sliced-open seam in the storm clouds,
the city across the lake still in a fog and the water
in a tantrum

you are all chocolate curls and puppy dog eyes,
family fireplace warmth,
lips magnetized to my skin and transparent smiles,
and she's quiet in silver revelatory haze--

in this quantum-split universe I've been
living in the wrong halves, in the storms, and even I
would have rather been left for dead
again

but your palms make me angry that I ever
trained myself to swallow rain,
convinced I could make dresses out of fog--
I am angry that I wanted anything besides you,

and I love you,
the way you glow with fervent comfort,
dripping in sunlight

I still find myself summoning you

even after I have been numbed and dulled and
painted greyscale,
the crawlspace between my bones and skin filled with spent ashes...

my stomach has learned to fold origami butterflies when she
feels like reminiscing,
missing when her floors weren't littered in corpses...

I still find myself summoning you

when I think that I have found a potent lighter fluid,
just to check that he still isn't enough,
and remember that I am still underwater...

I still find myself summoning you

playing your music, singing your songs in the voice that used to sing with you, and I am envious of it as it follows the melody from a memory I exhumed tonight because
it sounds like it remembers you better than I do,

but in the end I am glad I am forgetting you
even though it will never be my choice to let go
because perhaps one day I won't remember
what it was like to sing with you,
and I won't even notice I'm
underwater