life: a promise floating in amniotic fluid, a cluster of cells not yet scared of the light. your mother gave you to the world, vernix, tufted hair & all. pudgy limbs cast in hospital fluorescence. in the spotlight your body does not feel like it is yours. & even now, you blame your mother for giving

because she taught you to do the same. you give yourself away to repay her debt & yet greedy fingers still count the price of a mother’s love. [of a mother’s life.] drown eardrums with the whispers of boys with dead ladybug eyes & a heart like the shell of one. they cling to you 

like flies to honey. the feeling of being wanted reflects off their eyes and into the mirror of yours. & you add a page to your mother’s book: let kisses boil the tendons at melting point & watch as their wings get stuck in your skin. the buzzing will quiet. [you think this is

the closest you’ll ever get to flying.] the closest reality wrung from fever dreams where you find your soul still lost in thought. a minute of bliss at the ATM - bones crackling like coin deposits before the red blinks back at you. [in elementary school, the teachers told you to leave

your mark on the world. & they didn’t account for you, the quiet girl with mousey hair who came crying in the ER not because she couldn’t speak, but because she knew she was marked. a girl with her job already done & yet years of feeling unfinished ahead of her.] this you do not know:

your mother’s handwriting, her scrawl, her signature. instead there is a checkbook signed on the fabric of your mind. it is addressed to you: a promise made but not kept, an overgrowth of cells not yet turned to the darkness. a girl who is still an embryo when you look at the shadows.

& even now, you blame yourself for giving when only one had to. 

& even now, you blame yourself for taking from her.