Free Write 1, Week 10

Our Lady's Child is a Grimm Brothers' fairytale that I described below. It's short if you're interested in the real thing, so if so, look it up and read it. I promised myself I'd never write a poem about my mother, but this idea has been eating away at me for a while.

Our Lady's Child

The Virgin Mary steals children
from wood-cutters who can't cut
bread for his daughter's meals. Too poor.
So she takes the starved child and fills her
with sugar-cakes and paradise in a forest
branched with gold and angel secrets.
Even Heaven has traps.
There are thirteen doors,
and as is the way with God there is
the last door, the forbidden door,
filled with a knowledge denied.
And as is the way with God,
the child is entrusted with keys
to unlock all doors, forbidden
to know the knowledge of the last.
Of course she opens it.
And when the Virgin Mary asks,
though all signs beat-beat the obvious,
the girl lies and the girl denies that door
until she's cast out, a mute, from Heaven.

A king can never change a liar,
and the girl and her royal husband birth
a child, sweet like a doughy biscuit.
And the Virgin Mary, thief that she is,
asks that once heavenly child to sing
the truth of the thirteenth door.
And the girl lies. And lies. And lies.
And her children disappear into traces
of a memory throughout the kingdom--

memories. My mother made sandwiches
for snacks everyday. She taught me
who I was when I forgot myself and stole
my fleece jackets so I couldn't hide anymore.
That sterile night I tossed and shriveled
on a gurney, burnt to the second degree, my mom,
hovered like a flaming angel beside me.
Her red dress the only light house
in a morphine haze. She and I floated
in and out of a mother realm, her kisses
sweeter than any sugar-cake, the butter
of her mother love grew fatty in my veins
until it killed me. And I haven't seen
my mother's crows feet in years.
We don't talk anymore. And I realize
that I'm worth more in my mother's wallet
than I mean in her fat, black heart.

She ripped me away. Stole the thickest
parts of me and ate away my juicy insides.
And my mind begs for forgiveness, pleading
to forget the jagged cracks
in her motherhood, the faults that spew lies
like seepage from an ejector pump.
Mom lied, and she lied, and she sweated
her lies until the real morphed meaningless.
And my burning angel shriveled into a pile of ash
that never made phone calls on birthdays.

The town's people called their queen
a cannibal. She ate her children, consumed
them to protect her lies. To forget
that thirteenth door. She sacrificed
the only gift her body gave her. And the Virgin
took each bundle to Heaven, again and again
and the people cried against the queen
but could not know her hunger. Her need
to bend and fang the truth, limp in her mouth,
throbbing from the kill.
I wonder how her children felt
knowing their mother ate them, swallowed them
to feed her growling need to twist
reality. I wonder what her insides felt like. Was it
wet? Was it painless? Was it as cold inside
her endless belly as watching sandwiches,
watching jackets, watching kisses disappear
into the pulsing emptiness of forgotten time.