another dream…

Clouds are conductors of storms. Trees grow out, Storms grow down.

I watch my mommy sleep propped up face shadowed by the light of her iPad mini blasting the k-drama castaway baby in a language i do not know except for its shape as a demanding lullaby pounded into my bones since before i had a tongue. she sleeps with two small animals splayed out perfectly still–all three of them are. none touch.

I cry and feel old. I feel I am watching my child. I never see her rest I only see her do. Act and carry, no complaints for this is the life she walks. She looks like a baby who sleeps while her parents are fighting because there is always a fight when violence is the bubble of safety. She looks like a baby because she is a complete mystery to me and the world she breathes is infinite in sleep.

I get scared and walk away.

What if she wakes up and sees me see her. What if she sees my tears?

I decide to be brave and go back.

Because I want to look at my daughter sleeping. I want to feel that fullness to wonder deeply. To drink from a well of stars that pop on your tongue that my grandmother drew from when she was a daughter and not a matriarch.

Where did all the water go? Cried out clutching a half dead body whose soul shakes free pissed out onto trees that grow better with bodies’ water fermented to poison and drank to loosen jaw enough to gnaw on your heart.

my mother weathered so many storms she became water. my daughter coughed back so many tears she waterboarded herself. and i drink to both.

She’s beautiful in her stillness. This is now I know she’s not comfortable. Comfort can never be still, it is always chasing. Comfort can never be beautiful, it is too violent.

We can meet violence like a pillow between gun and head or we can listen to its echo. But the cops come anyway and to kill the cop in your head is to kill the psychiatrist in your head and you can use a pillow to silence the screams of this murder or you can prop your head up on it and sleep so your mother may watch you.