Love

I am haunted by how much our mothers do not know.

How a republic falls because of its backhanded deals,

stairwell secrets. My mother does not know I am lying

with a man who is darker than me, that we do not

have names for how we truly treat our bodies.

What we do with them. The other possesses me.

Without him the perception of me fails to exist.

My mother now is taking her sheers and cutting

through live shrimp. When I was a child she peeled

each flushed grape until only the pale fleshy bead

remained. She placed them onto a plate in one shining

mound, deseeded, in front of me. How I sucked and bled

the fruit of all their juice, hypnotized in front of the buzz

of television in each version of my childhood. I am

her daughter. This is certain. I am lying down with a man

who is darker than me and maybe this poem is my

real republic, my face is my face, or is it stolen from

my mother and hung over mine? If I were a dream

you could say my countenance was a string of flickering lights

made of teeth or an expression unraveling like a carpet

into a narrow river of another life. Does truth matter

when it's floating face up or face down?

The answer to this makes all the difference.!