My mother said complex people
need simple lives.
She said life is a struggle
against ourselves, that
we’re miscast actors who
have to go on in unsuitable roles.
My mother said she had
too much too soon.
She said she never
looked how she felt, that
she looked made for men and
felt broken by their attention.
My mother said the problem is
confronting our ideas about desire.
She said what we want is
often not what we want to want, that
want is misunderstood as hunger
when it’s carrying on eating after a meal.
My mother said she’d always
thought she’d been adopted.
She said someone like her
had never belonged, that
terraced houses on cobbled streets
rejected her just as much as she them.
My mother said she’d needed
to alter her natural voice.
She said the sounds she made
were wrong, that
they gave the impression she knew nothing
when really she knew far too much.
My mother said drinking
was a means of forgetting.
She said we do not want
to remember ourselves, that
who we are is a constant disintegration
undergoing the trauma of re-assemblage.
My mother said the face of her attacker
came forcibly back to her one night.
She said what we do to survive is
harden our skeletons, that
the mind is an old Victorian house
of facades and attics and basements within.
My mother said she’d been engaged
three times before my father.
She said eventually we decide
to do what we haven’t done, that
the urge to conform usurps us
like a slow mitochondrial expansion.
My mother said to look back on life
is to watch a story emerge.
She said she failed to see herself
as a writer, that
her subconscious did a number on her
when it fed her all the wants of others.
My mother said I come from
a long line of uncomfortable women.
She said the thing about
repression is it’s leaky, that
out from our lids drip
drops of resilience and resistance.
