Raw
a poem by ME

Going home with a family who chose me from a black & white ultra sound before my lungs had developed.
My family loved to remind me of my guilty birth,
Ripping open a sixteen-year-old girl before she ripened,
In my dreams she will always be the hard avocado I should have kept in a paper bag.

 When I was young, I had a dog named Samantha I called "mommy",
I cried into her side when I felt alone and she would lap up my tears.
I told the woman who raised me I loved my dog more than her.
So she straddled that dog with one hand on each side of Samantha's face and twisted Sam's head around until
she died staring into her killer's eyes.

"Mommy" was a compliment and a curse word sizzling the moisture in my mouth.

At night I'd hum rock-a-bye baby restlessly.
I want a voice to fall asleep to.
Instead I grew up quick and alone
Holding onto hurtful words I was raised with.

 Why did I fit inside my mother's womb and not her arms?

Unknown hurts like being left in a cradle fresh each morning
Not knowing if there will be another clean diaper

 My mother could belong to a name I read on the front page today
              Part of a drive by shooting or protest.
She has a porcelain face in my mind like the Lady of Guadalupe
And a swollen tear parting from the inner corner of her eye
Dripping to her outstretched arms.
But my mother is not a virgin queen.
She is not waiting to hold me.

No matter what offering I bring to lie at her feet
She is the statue in the back of the parish that will never cup my chin in her palm.

 I wish I could recognize my real last name in old newspapers,
If only it was carved in the walls of her womb by the men who came too close to home.

I still grab for her like a key on a kite in a thunderstorm.
Knowing if I ever reached out,
Our answers would singe the calluses I built without her.

I am the birth that was not celebrated.

No matter how many times I pierce my belly button,
I will always feel the last place I touched her
Before I got carried away.