lacuna raze acne scars and handlebars i never got to see. a smile that could melt all the crushed diamonds at my feet. you were the spitting image of your older brother. what was hard and mean in him wasn't in you at all. your eyes told everyone who you were before they knew you. felt-covered wooden hammers struck sad strings thinned out by all the clumsy young fingers that bashed those eighty-eight colourless keys and took their dreams away. brown bangs framed your forehead, shielding what was precious from the ditchwater and the dirt we called our lives. each divot in your skin a villanelle. i hid from all the love you held. i wouldn't have known what to do with it. i was so old then. older than i've ever been. you must be a mother now. you must be the best mother any child has ever had. you must have daughters. you have to know you can let their bangs grow out. your arms are all the armour they'll ever need. 220215 ... ovenbird My body is limestone. My womb, once small, unnoticed, shifted to accommodate the first electric shock of life. A sinkhole opened in my heart and into it I poured my dreams for the future: my finger grasped by a tiny hand, the first act of naming, a miracle from blood. When the life within me slipped away, when blood brought death, and the only cries shattering the silence of dawn were my own, when the waters of creation retreated, a dark and looming space remained. My hope dissolved and rushed back to the sea on the unfeeling tide. I fell into the lacuna that the waters gouged open and went blind in the total darkness there. I lived for awhile in that echoing well, that space blanker than a pristine page and I wrote the biography that began “I love you” but was never finished. Now my tears dissolve the word “mother” until it is meaningless and stalagmites grow from the slick stone floor in that place, dear one, where you used to live. Slowly, slowly, the emptiness takes on form, becomes a strange landscape that arises like a primordial dream. There’s a chill in the air that makes my teeth ache and the walls of this cavern grow knife edged sheets that threaten evisceration for those that dare to draw near, but there’s something beautiful too. I wait for stirrings in the mineral rich pools deep within my body. I wait to catch a glimpse of eyeless creatures swimming: a translucent salamander that might become something greater; something that lives, and thrives, and grows into the light. 250323 ... ovenbird This always hurts less than I expect it to--a needle sliding softly into my vein, my blood extracted for inspection. What vampiric magic is this, that my blood can tell a story about me without my consent? We'll see how iron deficient I am or if my thyroid is working properly. Perhaps we'll learn that I'm deficient in some essential mineral. But I wonder, does my blood whisper other tales as well? Does it hold microchimeric shards of the baby that never lived? Does her voice still echo somewhere between erythrocytes? Will my blood tell you what it is like to become a tomb? 250402 what's it to you? who go blather from