About My Mother's Business



I have never been about my mothers’ business.
She sat starving while my father fed me.
It was he who painted on my lips one Halloween
and told me I looked like Bette Davis,
and I went around the house screaming “WHAT A DUMP!”
What a dump.

I learned to curse like my father and bit the hand that fed me.
I flipped my silver Zippo for anyone who needed fire
and changed the spelling of my name
because she said I was just like him.
No one called me hers.
Sometimes, I see my father's belly, swollen, with me inside.

And now I reach for my mother's part in me.
I ask her to hold me but her arms are indifferent.
The defection was completed long ago, hers
and mine.

I have never been about my mothers’ business,
and now I am the hungry one.