Things My Mother and I Don’t Talk About
Mother taught me to linger in doorways.
Assess intent. Always sleep with one eye open.
Suffer immensely.
I wonder if she knows how long I’ve carried this. I still do.
Sleep evades me. There’s a guillotine under my eyelids instead.
Are we so obsessed with messy hearts?
Spilling pink matter onto paper,
onto sidewalks,
onto oncoming passerby.
Who decides when we’ve endured enough?
Cosmic fingertips plucking us up by
shirt collars. We are covered in shards of glass
that we’ve renamed Love.
Mother taught me to be inconspicuous and
calculating both.
To give my heart but never said to whom.
She bleeds pink. I stay awake.
Hannah Fuller is a graduate student at SUNY Brockport pursuing a career in school counseling. She has been published in Gandy Dancer, Third Wednesday, and Polemical Zine.