_an open letter for single mothers.

She’s not the same person she used to be.
Something less. But something more.
She’s a patchwork symphony
Of band-aids and bandages
Trying to hold together the fragile fragments
Quilting together her memories
In a Faberge fashion

A rose watered by stray prayers
With her roots embedded in turmoil
Working graveyard shifts
In tandem with the skeletons
She’s buried in the back of her closet
So her seed can blossom past her station

A tender touch that can nurture
A struggle into a diamond
Raging thunder, into silence
A son, into a man
A daughter, into a woman
And the cries of her children
Buzz like a crowded cathedral
In the hollow hallways of their home
Where the heart is

Labeled by her gender
By the grace in her hips
And the shape of her tits
Identified by her gentle touch
And the regal curve of her spine
Like a tower of a waving daffodil
With her chin held so high
Her crown grazes the heavens
Parting the sky like lightning
In the clenched fists of an angry god
Vandalizing egos like *snap*

She has no time to be broken.
Too strong, too tough, too tired to be broken.
Her fatigue hangs off the weary joints of her skeleton
Like paintings of a better tomorrow
Looking into a mirror to a broken yesterday.
Studying chalk traced outlines of past relationships
She hangs in her gallery of lessons and regrets.
Too many men have
Treated her eardrums like a landfill
So now there’s an abyss in her chest
Her pride won’t let a man fill
And a place in her heart
That her mind won’t let a man feel

But still she stands with her arms
Spread like magazine articles
Or the legs of that 16 year old girl
Who treats love like a rental film
It lasts less than two hours
Is best enjoyed with the lights off
And holding to it for any longer
Only means you’ll have to pay in the end.

A solemn woman
With a portrait of her battered heart
Swinging on a noose between the vaulted arches
Of her ribcage like a metronome
Counting time to the rhythm of her heartbeat
In the music box she calls her chest
With ghosts of miracles
Haunting the space behind her breasts
Visible past the stiff lipped armor
She tries to protect it with.

Weary eyelids like a horizon cradling the sunset
Between cumulus clouds and rays of sunshine
Slowly closing to the lullaby of mute songbirds
Trading lyrics to a chorus of cannon fire
Through the windows of her pupils

She has katanas hidden
Behind the ivory tombstones of her teeth
Sheathed between her cheeks
And the shimmering mask she calls a smile.
A tongue that cracks like whips
On the backs of pregnant silences
And broken sentences
That cushion the missing apologies
That sandcastle in her ears
Her speech is covered
In a thin film of sorrow
And every syllable sings a song of sadness
Chanting a broken hearted testament
Layered with passages she uses to escape with

Her essence is impossible
Her demeanor is the eye of the storm
And she moves with the grace
Of a hurricane with broken wings
Wishing she could hide beneath her dreams
When reality starts to look too much
Like a nightmare
Just so she won’t have to wake up one morning
And build up the courage to tell her children:

“Daddy’s not coming home.”