Coming Home

I moved home, bleakly

packing my belongings

into blue bins and black

garbage bags.

He met me at the corner,

his picked-clean arms

grabbing the bins' handles

and slocking them into

the back of his upscale SUV.

I cupped Bartholomew,

my nearly dead mint plant,

between my thighs, hoping

his anemic soil wouldn't run on

my new khakis. It had been

3 and a half years, 3 and a half years

since my mother had dropped me off,

smudging mascara on her

peachy swollen face, leaving her eldest

in the arms of an all-women's college

and I had not been home since,

or ever really. Home was always torrid,

blistering even in the winter

and I learned everything backwards,

honouring thy father and thy mother last.

***********

She wakes up before me in the mornings

and makes breakfast for my younger sister,

dew-eyed cutie with her Goth lace gloves.

She uses my old eyeliner, the fat feathered tip

lining her smooth wide lids. She thinks it represents

rebellion, some unique push into adulthood,

the silver bangles and spiky earrings,

(half of which she took from my old jewelry box)

but it's more a timid following, mimicking a canter

she doesn't realize she's already memorized,

but I love her for it, for her touching ignorance.

While I shower and dress, my Mother takes her to

school, the one I used to go to, just a mile

down the street, and when I walk downstairs,

smelling like a woman, there's an egg for me

on a flowered plate, a shiny porous amoeba

over gold and brown begonias, plump

and antiqued. Plates I broke

when I was young enough that the blame

always fell on my father.

In my other apartments, a few with terse roommates,

even fewer with ones I remember as friends,

and just one with a slumped old fiancé,

I remember a sense of displacement,

something wrong in the way the dust settled

on my computer screen and the way it

smelled when I opened the windows

after a thunderstorm. I wanted to mimic

the chaos of my childhood, the unknowing

of an upturned lip and the way my father would

sometimes come home, 9 times before I was 12,

with an announcement that we were, again,

moving, but what I stayed away from,

what I thought I was intelligently running from,

was the idea that chaos can settle, age

can ripen it into peace, where my Mother

was always a wolf, scratching her nails into the dirt,

she was actually an easily tamed dust bunny;

she loves me more than any man I've dated.

She goes out in the sullen time before sunrise

to refill a green and red plastic hummingbird feeder.

She does it because she says, if she doesn't,

they'll beat each other to death, supple dangerous

jewels saved by her careful attendance.