Kitchen, Sinister
by Laura Potts
Ten springs gone in my morning of life, I wore light
in the summer of my voice, in the candles once made
of my eyes. That night dusk swung out and away into noise
wild and white above town, and down in my childhood
garden lost the pond breathed out light grey and soft.
I remember not. But black clot and burnt in my throat
when she coughed up hot liver that night in the gloam,
the globes of her eyes gone bloodfull and long
did the birds scream murder outside. I cried. My
winter-ghost mother gone grey in her day, a tragedy
staring and wearing that cracked pale-fade skin in an old
kitchen light. When food was thin she served me lies. No,
the stars did not giggle the puddles that night
when my dark-fire youth wheeled a wind round the house,
her once-fluted mouth nursing liquor and meth. Her deathlight
was dark as a gobbet of gas, a heart in a jar on a chimney last
lit back when I was a lamb. After that? I took a bath. Black
was the path at infant’s end, a lack-lanterned track derailing
and cracked was the girlhood glow of my light. O mother
of mine, the window-steam bled itself pretty that night.
Under the trees, I sit in the asylum garden.
I swing the bottle to my lips and swig.