She became a sink.
She became a blind.
She became a styrofoam coffee cup.
She became a ball point pen.
She became the breeze through the door's splinters.
*
She became the mother who was at work at work,
at work at home
and at work at the shore
so her children never saw her
without a pencil tucked behind her ear.
She became the mother
who copy-edited at a tony house
before marrying and quitting that nonsense.
She became the mother
who began with her own
father father father.
She became the mother
tattooed with versions of virgins.
She became the mother
who never gave birth, never
adopted, never kidnapped
and whose biological clock
has been diffused.
She became the mother
she thought she had had.
She became the Other.
She became the mother who drank.
She became mother
of her girlfriend's child.
She became the mother
of any man who stepped
into the caffeine of her madness.
She became the mother
of betrayal.
She became the mother
who died in a hit-and-run.
She became the mother,
120 years old,
who eats a pound of chocolate a week.
She became the mother who is becoming.
In fact, stunning.
*
She had forgotten how to speak
especially to her husband
who for a dozen years
had been at most the mother
she thought she had had and had
before her sister was born.
He had adorned her.
He had desired her desire.
He had honored her words
and even liked her voice
at a mic or in bed
when the shade was drawn
to the draft
blowing from the limbs outside to limbs inside.
She forgot. Her tongue
she slept even when her mind sprinted.
Her teeth locked. Her lips
felt pasted shut.
When had he become
not her mother or had
become her mother
who had left her so alone
when the baby cried?
When had his heart become that heart
with its familiar exit to other narratives
rejecting even the whorls of her offerings?
*
The daughter writes a story
for the teacher
and for her mother who is a poet.
The story is about
a neighbor boy and girl
whose parents all die suddenly
on an afternoon of marketing.
The story traces the adventures
of the two orphans
who search for someone
to adopt them.
After circumnavigation
they look up the boy's uncle in Canton
who has also died but his wife
takes them in as her own.
This is a true story of her story.
*
She became the mother who refused
uncommon misery for common unhappiness.*
She became the mother who taught herself how to read
and was later tenured at a university
where she fucked the cannon with great pleasure.
*
How do daughters rehearse departure?
Iin letters to ungrateful boys,
in dresses too expensive for papa,
in swimsuits too small for comfort,
in baking breads, in "achievement tests"?
In speaking to friends about bleeding?
*
She became the mother heating stones
to tuck at the foot of her own bed
for the time being.