My mother’s house leans to one side
as if listening to something busy underground
worms loosening the soil,
mice combing roots, beetles
tunneling down, down, down
I wander room to room
measure the give of the floorboards
under my bare feet
and listen for whispers settled beneath the wood
I cradle my mother’s words,
scratched on a drug store receipt
I fold the slip of paper
over and over
smaller and smaller
cut my fingertips on the crease
if my grandfather is my father
am I a sister or an aunt
a daughter or a mother
a woman or a monster
Some folks linger over secrets
like a Sunday meal
they nibble, they chew
they lick words from their fingers
others swallow whole and spit out the ash
My grandmother cooks
enough to eat for days
she rubs the chickens clean with ash,
rids disease she says,
wipes the mites out, she says
I think
If I just had some of that
I could fix everything
Writing 