Smudge
Place it on the bedside table
Burn the house
It’s late and the ointments bend their arms and smile, sterilized laughs bellowing from plastic abdomens
sucked in
laughs that sound as though they were washed on their way out the throat
They do not move to greet me as I unsuction them from scribbled marble their processed flesh a fabricated assurance,
a promise that tomorrow, everything will get better
I bought you another echoes against a popcorn ceiling whose kernels I imagine collapsing with a fluorescent sun, feeding empty bodies
I say nothing just to hear the silence pound in my throat my tongue has learned to swallow regret without water to soften the way she sighed
against the futility of a mother’s love
I’m only trying to help
Doing everything I can
We can go
to a therapist if you want
Just tell me
what you need from me
Her pleas always seeped through the walls
ruining the cables and red carpet she swore she was going to replace one day
the kind you step on barefoot and bleeding
the kind you don’t wring out on warm afternoons
On wet afternoons, when a month’s rain fell all at once and you were
somehow, for some reason, always heading home with groceries or pressed button-downs in the back, how are you feeling would ricochet against the leather lining and I again wouldn’t answer or I would say the wrong thing
on purpose because it’s quite easier than trying to find the right one
and she would get angry, and just for a second, I would smile because if we crashed, I could blame the scars on the asphalt
Sometimes I wonder if she hears the fine or if it has morphed into a species of silence, the kind that wedges itself between two people
I have learned to slam my tongue against the roof of my mouth when she speaks, a belt against a child’s ass daring them to cry
Sometimes she tells me I am beautiful
when she doesn’t know what to say and I watch
how her lipstick curls inward, how she breathes a perfect shell around the lies she produces so easily
But I don’t let her touch me
still somehow afraid she will
chisel a splintered vein
that my life will flow out of me and stain her shoes that she’ll start crying
that she’ll soak her body and clothes in a mother’s love and somehow
survive the flames
By Flora Ranis.