Reflections of a Grown Woman

Her hallway opened into the singing of a moon half drowned
in a cup of evening tea while she stopped moving to keep from waking
and wandering through another fifteen years of rain trickling down her windows.
Lighting a candle didn't bring him back, she whispered to the girl
standing through the haze as wax kissed the skin on her hands

like a bee. Her hand flexed under the weight. Where will we see him come,
said the girl through the haze. Where will his eyelids bat our cheeks
and call us angel again. Climbing the ladder
never brought her comfort, and she filled her lungs until
the water spilled from her eyes, reflections of a grown woman

standing before a man who wasn't her father. His legs too skinny
and his feet too heavy on the stairs. The hay felt like needles through her
dress and screams came running and laughing from the upstairs window
like the time the man not her father smashed the plates against the floor
and they played hide and seek together under the table

until morning. They pretended their tears were a potion to turn
them into birds and they could fly. She sat on the hay
until she smelled the man collapse into a cloud of smoke
and float away like the old raft on the lake.
Here again she cried herself into the bedroom and the blood

on the sheets. She could smell him there, the leather boots and the warm
petals. Always he left warm petals across the floor
like drops from a bloody nose to the bed, where hair and sweat
crawled together and held each other tight, the sheets wrinkled into a lonely
night filled with promises and handprints left on the window.