Breadcrumb #652

TRACE DEPASS

family court fucks up being a child. adopted by my grandmother,
born when mom was 16, i think. i choose not which man but which
boy i might become. i remember migrating. three, yet no parents.
then court saying the boy old enough to choose this time.
in 4th grade, visitation rights allowed me my moms
& she was a fly hood moms, she had edges, my mom still
calls herself "a bird". this how she loves herself. i think. i didn't
get the chance to know her how nests know branches.

i tap her and custody paper fall like bird feathers onto the floor. here
black foster homes are broken trees. & i hatched from the system
perpetuating itself wherein most poems don’t make it out.
mom came to me
when i was five, & seven, a couple times like
you know
i'm your mother,... right?
i say yes

she must need to know i know.
& this is how i love my moms, i think. &, i know i inherited her flinch
at those that say
they'll “fly,” yet they'll
“...return.”
when mom can’t find
word to peck - i tell her

i wasn’t able to mosaic
whichever promise that my father left inside as shrapnel, but
i want to.

& even after i am a pile of feathered bone dancing
into dust, i still might not find “enough”. but
i did make sure to keep searching for it, for
whomever needs them a man. i dig & claw a way with
wings, & like a god in nest,
gray clouds escape under me as mists, or his myths

& i bite, chew grit through
where the his absence emptied, like thunder, into my nest,
like

“wow. is this a cage i bit too? this want to be enough
for you - how my mouth mistakes birdcage for
stubborn twigs? was dna what st(r)uck as storm & let
blood somersaults across my body? this whole time?
this why i was born unmade? because since birth i
was thrown in this cage wherein not a thing in it
rattled like a parent's love? how? did my father think
i was a Phoenix? these his ashes he forgot in me, or
am i burning? & is that a lock? i only know five
answers for certain...”

1. i am not my father’s Phoenix.
2. home must be wherever we kiss to keep the
warmth in & shut the smoke out.
3. neglected & abandoned are fires that could only be
manmade.
4. vaseline -athing protects the skin from crisps
because some boys’ wings hurt more, burn better,
than the birds.
5. lightning. who knows if it’s what he left me, or why
he left her. but if my father’s answer for why he gone
had a name, it would be lightning.

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