Mom,

I have cursed you enough in the lines of my poems and between them, in the silences which fall like ash flakes on the water tank from a smog bound sky.

I have cursed you because I remember the smell of Palmolive on a sealskin coat and because I feel more abandoned than a baby seal on an iceberg covered in its mother's blood.

I have cursed you as I walked and prayed on a concrete terrace high above the street because whatever I pulled down with my bruised hand from the bruised sky, whatever lovely plum came to my mouth you envied and spat out.

Because you saw me in your image, because I favored you, you punished me. It was only a form of you my poems were seeking. Neither of us knew. For years we lived together in a single skin.

We shared coats.
We hated each other as the soul hates the body for being weak,
as the mind hates the stomach for needing food,
as one lover hates the other.

I kicked in the pouches of your theories like a baby kangaroo.
I believed you on Tolstoy & Darwin.
I said I loved Pushkin (you loved him).

I vowed Monet was better than Bosch. Who cared?
I would have said nonsense to please you and frequently did.
This took the form of course, of fighting you.
We fought so beautifully.
We fought like one boxer and his punching bag.
We fought like mismatched twins.
We fought like the secret sharer and his shade.

Now, we're apart. Time doesn't heal all wounds. Separateness is real and keeps growing. One by one the mothers drop away, the lovers leave, the babies outgrow clothes. Some get insomnia- the poet's disease and sit up nights nursing at the nipples of their pens.

I have made hot milk and kissed you where you are.
I have cursed my curses.
I have cleared the air. Now I sit here writing, breathing you.

XOX,
your daughter


~SAS~