My ghosts breathe accusingly—a winter mass, a mirror’s impermanent
erasure—again shaving I’m sorry from the face over my face in the glass.
It’s not just the birds—their abridged flight, the stains the sky wears today
through this washable window—but my children’s tiny hands absolving the glass.
Of guilt? Of shame? Is it his blood raging generations through my veins or this white-
washed silence compelling me to pull our history, face-by-face, from its frames of glass?
All this uneaten grain filling silo after silo—always at dusk, in my mind—swarmed now
with mealworms & mites & someone else’s hunger. How it cuts the tongue like shards of glass.
& those goddamned honeycombs, failing again. How our neighbor’s unable to keep his bees
close enough to cultivate. Our house too is a small box of dust & wing & against the glass
separating us from the world curtains blur our reflections like rain. Like stars cutting through
cloud, a sustainable song. May my girls never be dead enough to fear themselves in our glass.
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