The Bottom Shelf Review

I.

January I am less asleep than ever
Under the cotton sheets left wrinkled from June.
Blood biting at my fingertips as I furl,
Shrinking into the flesh that soon promises to be
Shared. Thin skin and fetal folded I host frost
As my lips pass milky clouds.

January I am dreaming my way out,
Dreaming until I pass Mommy on the steps,
Mommy who clutches quilts
(There is more than one)
And Mommy who cloaks my body
With the blessed burden of plaid-patterned cloth.

January I am a daughter endeared through its weight
That shallows my breath, swells my veins.
Sleeping, undeserving, limp strands cling
To the dampness of my face as I unfold, sticky
Limbs like a fig opening itself to waspy warmth.
Oh, January, Janus, my mother melts
Your impregnable isolation.

II.

February breeds change
And I have found myself
A most unwilling recipient.

March tells me a brewing
Has begun in the redless agony of
A month dry and brooding.

March shows me before she
Grows me, a thing floating alone in the
Cold hole of my stomach,

Trapped as I am and both
It and I burdened under the
Fingerless blackness

Of my solemn skin. My dark
Sahara I suddenly share
With this wormy pearl.

Cannot hold much longer. Here
It lies, shivering and without body. Hear
It howl as it whispers for Mommy.

I answer with clawing nails to
Sore abdominal skin,
Reciprocating its cry but this time

Because I am angry,
This because I loathe
Where it lies.

I tell it You do not belong.
You did not ask
Where you set up home.

And so it is silenced,
“It” without sex and
“It” without identity,

By a pill and a flush
And that’s all, now hush.
Red litter in bed

Lives longer than you,
Lives as you once did
In the lonely porcelain

Of vortex and spiral.
And I’m back to where I started.
Red litter does not stop

And it doesn’t belong to me.

III.

April I have aged backwards once again
And just as before you have played me poor.

Just as before the dirt tracks behind me
And I am not the pristine woman I tell
Myself I will become, year after year.

This year is even worse. Dirt trails behind
Me, dirt caked on so thick my pink skin is
Impregnable by light. But I guess not quite.

April, I tell you I am waiting to be changed,
For your days to help me shed a new skin,
To glisten with tolerance and to blink away sins.

But denial comes natural to me, and you,
Mother who tries, I cannot seem to let you in.
Tell me, Mother distant, what month laid bare

The truth of your Daughter Disappointment?
April I came alive and April I am nothing
More than the sighs I heave as

I reject and I receive. Crib and quilt
Whisper at me and I cannot shoo them,
Tell one from the other, oh,
Mother. I’ve almost gleaned a new identity.

April, I’m sorry, I know you did try, only
I cannot be a mother when I treat my own unkind.