Bodies

By Marissa Mireles Hinds

My Mother told me today while afternoon hot streams
threw themselves,
like excited children from her eyes to the bottom of her cheek.
Dripping.
Her thin skin on forehead
folding, like angry arms, from the pain.
She said “today I feel like I did the day
I would have committed suicide a decade or so ago.”
This time, stress caused by my Stepfather,
a upside down mirror of my Father/ Her Father; his incessant
hubris soured further by his consumption of Ego; the mantra, repeated.
“I do not blame that young woman.”
a little older than me.
Racing down the Tacoma freeway unbuckling
herself/disabling the airbags aiming for the
underpass where she could fly. beautifully
serene: glass glittering her cheek. Through the
window
Her face implanted in the asphalt.
She says with a shattered jaw
“400,000 in payments for the children when
I pass.
It was an accident.
They will all go to college and
live happily, without me.”
Alas, it was Us she thought of before deciding not to perish.

Apparently it was my brother’s brown eyes,
my little sister’s cherub smile,
and the crinkled face that I would make, images tattooed behind her closed lids.
She buckled back in.
Heading home.
Into the arms of her children, an iron hold
that perhaps might be better.