Night insists you drink it first, but light fights back with a billion asterisks.
That’s the way it goes, isn’t it? First the dark stuffs you sick then bursts
you open with day. I watched you sleep that morning, your breath too selfish
to notice your throat was thick with things you should’ve died without knowing.
The night before, you asked me if you were a terrible mother. You stayed,
even though you were often afraid he’d one day be too drunk to decipher
the bodies of his daughters from that of his wife. Your face was puffy and pink
as you waited for my answer, eyes black holes in their ashy orbits.
Let’s say I got it right. That the words I spoke burrowed into the most stubborn
snags of suffering. That I finally understood how to hold you the way a bruise
holds its storm until the body finally says Enough. Soon you’ll be forty years ago
and I will be only everything I want to be. Or twenty watching your own mother
unknow her daughter. I wonder which moment will lure you in
for your last memory. Let’s say it’s the one when you were most yourself,
or the one you were least. Or the one that made you into the person you always
meant to be and you leaned, fierce and face-first, into its endless dawn.
Kami Westhoff is a writer and teacher living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Meridian, The Pinch, Third Coast, Passages North, West Branch, Redivider, and Eclectica. Her chapbook, Sleepwalker, received the 2016 Minerva Rising Dare to Be Award.