Inheritance

Holding open the bathrobe, she looks

for signs: a housewife’s belly of leftovers

and fasts and scars left by gut

and lung experts who gave assurances

of indefinite time before ripping out

half an intestine. She flips words over

for belly meanings: forsake and ransack

share a root; gazette comes from the seed

of magpies. She thinks of wind-mauled nests,

stolen eggs, her crow’s love for another woman’s spawn,

her lavish need to mop up the leavings of love.

Old bread dipped in salt water, re-fried.

Squatting over a white toilet, she swears

she will not be shamed. She mouths the words:

No Shame. Though everything she touched

was cheap and sure to kill ahead of time,

she swears she will not end up like

the old woman: wads of cottonwool

on the bedside table, bottom smeared

like a baby’s, her face turned to the wall

in a final hurrah of shame. In her gut, she feels

the hard swell of genetic doom.

The very room has started to smell

of the 1990s. She changes the yellow bulb

to a higher wattage and scans her iris

for flecks of grey. A maternal DNA

bleached pale as northern winter skies.

She rubs vaseline into her knuckles,

ignores their knobbly red deja vu.

Her underwear lies soaking in the pink

plastic tub, the type the old woman used.

She knows, it’s coming: her silent refuge

behind pots and pans, her squirreling away

of sweets, her habit of smoothing down

the sheets, her wobbly faith in fruiting trees,

her bitten lips, her frown. It’s all there.

It’s upon her now, there isn’t any help for it.

She knows it’s coming, that call to bed.

She will lay in the shadow thrown by a hoary

clothesline, fingers telling the gouty beads of time

and whispering slyly to a scolded child

the wisdom of occasional lipstick and a bowed head.