The wounding

The wounding

My Mother was a battering ram,
she held the essence of me in her palm
as if I were moldable,
a piece of molten metal,
her flesh, already quartered by war,
remained outwardly untarnished by the touch.
She was
some nights
rage personified,
a wraith, wandering landscapes of flesh,
marking them with map lines of her personal monoliths,
cities turned to rubble -
sundered under someone else's teeth.
Other nights she resembled the rubble itself,
or the bodies laying beneath,
stretched still and devoid
of anything bar grief
and a dulling, almost frozen, apathy.
Some days she lit fires
as if we could be allies
curled beside it's light,
as if a queasy, feral unease
wasn't birthed in me in the wake,
as if hope was welded within my matter,
something searing and yet possible to hold.
But safety remained skinned from me,
hunted from my insides out
and in the aftermath,
when the wounds of war
healed due to the lack of her being,
when that world became worlds away,
galaxies, wild universes,
when they licked their new life upon me,
I thought infrequently of her borders,
the feel of her castle floor
and the quiet, sour way
I had once had the foolishness
to call it home.