And The Wolf.
A fragment of the story was muttered over dinner
when she was twelve,
her aunt, wine-drunk, pulled away before
berating her father
and an argument on her sixteenth birthday,
his guilty lips speaking into a white coffee mug
admitted the rest.
She hid her mother's photograph for a year after,
each day becoming more like him than the last.
And She the Mother, the Martyr of Lore,
basked in the white light of memory.
By twenty, her hands stopped shaking from fear
of who either of them could be
and she'd made peace with the echos of him
bouncing off of ceilings above
distractionless beds.
She imagined the days following her mother's death
as if she'd been there,
the silent decision and
the penance to be paid by those that took her. Beyond empathy,
there would be embrace.
And He the Father, a Wolf of Shade
consumed the light and hardened her.
On Valentines Day, when she was twenty-two,
she held his helplessness in her hand and listened
to him fade on monitors.
And She, wrapped in shadows,
became the Vengeance he once was.
Robin Sinclair is a queer, genderqueer writer of mixed heritage and mixed emotions, currently on the road reading from their debut book of poetry, Letters To My Lover From Behind Asylum Walls (Cosmographia Books 2018). Find Robin at RobinSinclairBooks.com and on Twitter (@Ghost_Of_Mary).
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