Mother

One time there was a body in you made of other things.

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You are porous like a whiffle ball of sinew- things pass through, use your body as a home.

Things stick like gum in your stomach, like your mother said it would when you were young.

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You remember random things (e.g. the suburbs where you grew up, the smell of waffles on cast iron) and nostalgia begins to set it. Something like mold climbing up the foundation of a house but maybe less fatal. Fungus, moss, the calcium in the Copenhagen water. The snow sticks to the ground where it is the coldest. As a child you never realized that someone living in a beautiful house could be sad.

 

Porousness leads to virtuosic empathy.

 

Your skin, touching mine. My skin, breathing.

 

To reach dreams, requires for you to sleep.

Like when my grandmother almost chopped her finger off, but died from the heart attack instead. Like when my grandmother gave birth to my mother, or my grandmothers mother gave birth to her, or like when the hundreds of mothers gave birth to the a-little-bit-less than hundreds of mothers that generation by generation formed the triangle that at some point happened to end up with, me. I have complete villages inside of my body. Small pathways, and seven-lane high-ways with information, that I do not remember. But I did take my hand away from the fire, the first time I touched it.