Love

I am haunted by how much our mothers do not know. How a republic falls because of its backhanded deals, stairwell secrets. My mother does not know I am lying with a man who is darker than me, that we do not have names for how we truly treat our bodies. What we do with them. The other possesses me. Without him the perception of me fails to exist. My mother now is taking her sheers and cutting through live shrimp. When I was a child she peeled each flushed grape until only the pale fleshy bead remained. She placed them onto a plate in one shining mound, deseeded, in front of me. How I sucked and bled the fruit of all their juice, hypnotized in front of the buzz of television in each version of my childhood. I am her daughter. This is certain. I am lying down with a man who is darker than me and maybe this poem is my real republic, my face is my face, or is it stolen from my mother and hung over mine? If I were a dream you could say my countenance was a string of flickering lights made of teeth or an expression unraveling like a carpet into a narrow river of another life. Does truth matter when it's floating face up or face down? The answer to this makes all the difference.