All You Need is Love
When the song throbbed through the basement ceiling, you knew
your mother was at it again:
knocking around furniture. Scrubbing a floor that already gleamed, mourning your sea captain
father’s absence. You and your sister knew to stay downstairs.
For being such a slender woman, once fueled
with a tumbler of vodka, she’d seize your hair like reins. At 6:30
every night, this was how it went:
She’d put on a bathrobe. Remove her winged eyeliner and bronze lips. Her eyes would smear to dark
sockets you needed to dodge. When a woman has everything, sometimes it’s too much: the looming house that grew
emptier as each child became old enough to bolt. The never-ending checking account she’d dip
into the day after a beating or one of dad’s absences. you never saw the glass
anchor around her neck. That all she wanted was to rise out
of that suburb
named after cut-down trees. For time to take her in its white wings.
To fly her high above a world she’d once loved,
until she loved it again.
