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One boyfriend said to keep the bullets locked in a different room. Another urged clean it or it could explode. Larry thought I should keep it loaded under my bed,

We walked five blocks to the elementary school, my mother’s high heels crunching through playground gravel. We entered through a side door. Down the long corridor, decorated with Halloween masks, health department safety posters— we followed the arrows to the third grade classroom. My mother stepped alone into the booth, pulling the curtain behind her. I could see only the backs of her calves in crinkled nylons. A partial vanishing, then reappearing pocketbook crooked on her elbow, our mayor’s button pinned to her lapel. Even then I could see—to choose is to follow what has already been decided. We marched back out finding a new way back down streets named for flowers and accomplished men. I said their names out loud, as we found our way home, to the cramped house, the devoted porch light left on, the customary meatloaf. I remember, in the classroom converted into a voting place— there were two mothers, conversing, squeezed into the children’s desk chairs.

—Faulkner My mother is a fish and the sky is low and orange, and the long grass rises in the still air. The mud is black and worms turn their cold segments at my feet. I used to walk with an old lady. It seemed far from water and the ground sank. Weeds were higher than my head. Slugs slept in the mud. My mother is a fish and the sky swallows my head. A fine rain comes and softens the ferns. In March before the crocus and the lily, eggs bunch in the shoal of green jelly. Crabs glide through them. A kingfisher is dead on a rock. My mother is an eel winding a light around the rock. Even without a moon the black glows. * The sun grows like an egg over the bridge, the first birds are silver and swoop down for my mother. When the lady came we jumped— She took us to find worms we could squeeze in our hands. I went with my father to the dark water. I went with a bucket of mud. When we doubled the worm on the hook and it coiled, I could hear how a bass could thud. I grabbed it with a wet hand, and watched its eye go black as I dropped it in a metal bucket. Hack it along the gill and throw the head to the gulls.

1. The dark socket of the year the pit, the cave where the sun lies down and threatens never to rise, when despair descends softly as the snow covering all paths and choking roads: then hawkfaced pain seized you threw you so you fell with a sharp cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk. My father heard the crash but paid no mind, napping after lunch yet fifteen hundred miles north I heard and dropped a dish. Your pain sunk talons in my skull and crouched there cawing, heavy as a great vessel filled with water, oil or blood, till suddenly next day the weight lifted and I knew your mind had guttered out like the Chanukah candles that burn so fast, weeping veils of wax down the chanukiya. Those candles were laid out, friends invited, ingredients bought for latkes and apple pancakes, that holiday for liberation and the winter solstice when tops turn like little planets. Shall you have all or nothing take half or pass by untouched? Nothing you got,Nun said the dreydl as the room stopped spinning. The angel folded you up like laundry your body thin as an empty dress. Your clothes were curtains hanging on the window of what had been your flesh and now was glass. Outside in Florida shopping plazas loudspeakers blared Christmas carols and palm trees were decked with blinking lights. Except by the tourist hotels, the beaches were empty. Pelicans with pregnant pouches flapped overhead like pterodactyls. In my mind I felt you die. First the pain lifted and then you flickered and went out. 2. I walk through the rooms of memory. Sometimes everything is shrouded in dropcloths, every chair ghostly and muted. Other times memory lights up from within bustling scenes acted just the other side of a scrim through which surely I could reach my fingers tearing at the flimsy curtain of time which is and isn’t and will be the stuff of which we’re made and unmade. In sleep the other night I met you, seventeen your first nasty marriage just annulled, thin from your abortion, clutching a book against your cheek and trying to look older, trying to look middle class, trying for a job at Wanamaker’s, dressing for parties in cast off stage costumes of your sisters. Your eyes were hazy with dreams. You did not notice me waving as you wandered past and I saw your slip was showing. You stood still while I fixed your clothes, as if I were your mother. Remember me combing your springy black hair, ringlets that seemed metallic, glittering; remember me dressing you, my seventy year old mother who was my last dollbaby, giving you too late what your youth had wanted. 3. What is this mask of skin we wear, what is this dress of flesh, this coat of few colors and little hair? This voluptuous seething heap of desires and fears, squeaking mice turned up in a steaming haystack with their babies? This coat has been handed down, an heirloom this coat of black hair and ample flesh, this coat of pale slightly ruddy skin. This set of hips and thighs, these buttocks they provided cushioning for my grandmother Hannah, for my mother Bert and for me and we all sat on them in turn, those major muscles on which we walk and walk and walk over the earth in search of peace and plenty. My mother is my mirror and I am hers. What do we see? Our face grown young again, our breasts grown firm, legs lean and elegant. Our arms quivering with fat, eyes set in the bark of wrinkles, hands puffy, our belly seamed with childbearing, Give me your dress that I might try it on. Oh it will not fit you mother, you are too fat. I will not fit you mother. I will not be the bride you can dress, the obedient dutiful daughter you would chew, a dog’s leather bone to sharpen your teeth. You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound. Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks barbed and drawing blood with their caress. My twin, my sister, my lost love, I carry you in me like an embryo as once you carried me. 4. What is it we turn from, what is it we fear? Did I truly think you could put me back inside? Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten furnace and be recast, that I would become you? What did you fear in me, the child who wore your hair, the woman who let that black hair grow long as a banner of darkness, when you a proper flapper wore yours cropped? You pushed and you pulled on my rubbery flesh, you kneaded me like a ball of dough. Rise, rise, and then you pounded me flat. Secretly the bones formed in the bread. I became willful, private as a cat. You never knew what alleys I had wandered. You called me bad and I posed like a gutter queen in a dress sewn of knives. All I feared was being stuck in a box with a lid. A good woman appeared to me indistinguishable from a dead one except that she worked all the time. Your payday never came. Your dreams ran with bright colors like Mexican cottons that bled onto the drab sheets of the day and would not bleach with scrubbing. My dear, what you said was one thing but what you sang was another, sweetly subversive and dark as blackberries and I became the daughter of your dream. This body is your body, ashes now and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts, my throat, my thighs. You run in me a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood, you sing in my mind like wine. What you did not dare in your life you dare in mine.

My mother’s God has written the best of the protestant proverbs: you make the bed you lie in it; God helps him who helps himself. He tends to shy away from churches, is more to be found in phone calls to daughters or rain clouds over rusty grass. The Catholics have got him wrong entirely: too much waving the arms about, the incense and caftan, that rainbow light. He’s leaner than that, lean as a pair of grocer’s scales, hard as a hammer at cattle sales the third and final time of asking. His face is most clear in a scrubbed wooden table or deep in the shine of a laminex bench. He’s also observed at weddings and funerals by strict invitation, not knowing quite which side to sit on. His second book, my mother says, is often now too well received; the first is where the centre is, tooth for claw and eye for tooth whoever tried the other cheek? Well, Christ maybe, but that’s another story. God, like her, by dint of coursework has a further degree in predestination. Immortal, omniscient, no doubt of that, he nevertheless keeps regular hours and wipes his feet clean on the mat, is not to be seen at three in the morning. His portrait done in a vigorous charcoal is fixed on the inner curve of her forehead. Omnipotent there in broad black strokes he does not move. It is not easy, she’d confess, to be my mother’s God.

She kept them high on the top shelf, In boxes big as drums— Bright, crescent-shaped boats With little fishnets dangling down— And wore them with her best dress To teas, coffee parties, department stores. What a lovely catch, my father used to say, Watching her sail off into the afternoon waters.

My mother saw the green tree toad on the window sill her first one since she was young. We saw it breathe and swell up round. My youth is no sure sign I’ll find this kind of thing tho it does sing. Let’s take it in I said so grandmother can see but she could not it changed to brown and town changed us, too.

She opened her mouth and a moose came out, a donkey, and an ox—out of her mouth, years of animal grief. I lead her to the bed. She held my hand and followed. She said,Chết rồi, and like that, the cord was cut, the thread snapped, and the cable that tied my mother to her mother broke. And now her eyes red as a market fish. And now, she dropped like laundry on the bed. The furniture moved toward her, the kitchen knives and spoons, the vibrating spoons—they dragged the tablecloth, the corner tilting in, her mouth a sinkhole. She wanted all of it: the house and the car too, and the flowers she planted, narcissus and hoa mai, which cracked open each spring—the sky, she brought it low until the air was hot and wet and broke into a rain— the torrents like iron ropes you could climb up, only I couldn’t. I was drowning in it. I was swirled in. I leapt into her mouth, her throat, her gut, and stayed inside with the remnants of my former life. I ate the food she ate and drank the milk she drank. I grew until I crowded the furnishings. I edged out her organs, her swollen heart. I grew up and out so large that I became a woman, wearing my mother’s skin.

because she needed a lavish taste on her tongue, a daily tipple of amber and gold to waft her into the sky, a soluble heat trickling down her throat. Who could blame her for starting out each morning with a swig of something furious in her belly, for days when she dressed in flashy lamé leggings like a starlet, for wriggling and dancing a little madly, her crazy reels and her rumbas, for coming home wobbly with a flicker of clover’s inflorescence still clinging to her clothes, enough to light the darkness of a pitch-black hive.

Every spring my mother says I should buy a straw hat so I won't overheat in summer. I always agree but the valley's soon cold, and besides my old Borsalino is nearly rain-proof. She's at it again, it's August, the grapes are sugaring. I say,Okay, and pluck a little spider from her hair— hair so fine it can't hold even one of her grandmother's tortoise shell combs.