is secretly about my mother. don’t let the cardinals
or the murky bodies of water fool you. when i sent
you work about the songbirds, i was telling you about
how thick the stitches on her stomach were. how
serum and blood would bloat them, and ooze through
four sets of sheets. if you ever received that packet
of ocean poems in the mail, they were all about the
summer i was freshly sixteen—or was i fourteen—
potentially i was twenty—and her retina detached.
the summer she wore the svelte purple eyepatch
to match the ocular bruising and when my uncle or
one of her boyfriends offered more than soup or brief
visit, said “no, only Sydney” or did she say “i only trust
Sydney”—“only she will” or “only she will do it right.”

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Note: originally published in Booth.