FREED VERSE

after Natalie Diaz, “As a Consequence”

As a Consequence Of

me stealing all the lightbulbs,
my mother lives without light, groping,
always searching, always saying You are lovely.

A tumbled quartz and a charcoal capsule guard her heart while
tiptoeing from the kitchen tile to the living room.
The only necklace my mother wears is my hands around her throat.

I paint her face with shadows from my own.
She says mantras to recast her aura, 
perhaps to mend her broken bones. 

She eats eggshells like there's no tomorrow—
but just because her throat is cut on the inside doesn't mean 
her skin's unscarred. She's bandaging a coffin 

yet to be filled, her chosen home. This makes it very hard 
to visit me. This makes it a lot like burying us alive 
under hand-in-hand ruins—so close to her face, I recognize some things: 

my too-blue eyes, smile lines, uneven set of lashes, 
the light in her eyes that I think makes up for what I stole,
but so much more is disguised by being dismantled 

and combatively convinced at 5 p.m. 
on a Tuesday night in Texas that everything's okay
while she's trying to remember what little family she has left. Mark and Mom

chop firewood by the chicken coop 
reminiscing about when their almost-gone mother was still whole.
The axe comes down heavy—

gravity pulls so strong when the ground is shaking. It's tough 
for her to vacuum up the kitty litter in my grandma's assisted living room, 
especially when the old bittie keeps saying 'Stop working so hard'
and I am silent on the couch.

Grandma the grigio-sipper, me the lotus-eater—I'm the fuckup,
but Mom is the lost Magi, following a North Star which 
can't shine in the shade of double-stacked coffins. 
I lick my crystal lips, 

siphon stevia from my after-school days so I can remember when 
fake sugar still tasted sweet. My mom tries to dress the place up—
family albums, poetry by Frost, my grandfather's memorial portrait.

His eyes follow her around the room, reminding her of the day 
she 'had enough,' flushed the glass down the drain, her heart colder
than the turkey she was quitting. She's back on crystal now,

but only when she wears it on her neck and wonders why 
the women in her life can't be as strong as she was. My mom can't
clean the windows now because her muscles would break our thinning panes.

Instead she spends hours on the phone, walks her dog, and pays hundreds
for oils and sound baths just so she can't hear her heart wail. I 
hear it beat, hollow, after every dial tone. There's a hole in it now,

usually the shape of the promise pendant I gave her but sometimes as big 
as the dusty room my grandma is dying in now. My mom is a sad guitar 
tuned to happy chords for the sake of my untrained ear. 

They are more like elegies than notes—
they are difficult to get through. 

They are difficult to get through.

It takes a ton of reaching and hard stomps on loose tile 
to make it. The Tower of Babel threatens to crumble if we don't.
Babel is painted white, white enough to make small talk 

seem innocent—we don't have to listen when we are blind.
It's crazy how dark it is between coffined walls. We don't 
see much. We can't spot each other when we're looking at our splinters.

When I decide to return the lightbulbs, the only thing my mom says is How 
much longer? I prefer that to what she wrote in spirulina toothpaste 
on the ceiling last weekend: What does she do with all the lightbulbs? 

But we don't talk about what I see in the mirror, particularly 
not since I punched the glass out. Anyway,
my mom only laughs these days, not at jokes, 

but at swan songs and 80's tunes. That, and the sound 
of the axe coming down to split the timber before the fire starts.