For the Sonorous

Ghostmother

i.

the drumming house behind my ribcage gates

is haunted. My mother visits with her ghost singing “you have forgotten me”

but my blood oceans have tried sending tides

to cloak anticlockwise shores

again and again

                       still,

I cannot remember her

and dad lives without forgetting.

ii.

ghostmother is made up of fragmented memory stones

I cry to piece her together with scissors and empty adhesive liquid grief.

She haunts her daughter by not haunting her

And in this ribcaged house,

there’s ancient rust hugging bone & porcelain sits

too clean,

ridden

of homemade fried rice & soup stains

            she watches as I discover mothers in unfamiliar

            things & alien-blood that has never once touched her.

iii.

mother: “the conversations we exchange in your head

are stirred with false dialogues

you mix together like the softened used-to-be honey stars

in your cereal.

Small treasure, to love a ghost is to keep looking for its shadow

but forgetting that its shadow is

            where you step.”

iv.

ghostmother, ghostmother,

your daughter, too, lives as a ghost of you