When Winter

December settles like skin over the trees’
skeleton: bones bowed under a broken
sky: my mother is the body of winter—

her mind near the frozen falls
in Ithaca, 1979. Father’s farmed hands
at her throat, over her mouth. How he tried to beat

her mind back into her body. Like a lost child
who somehow finds her way home. But,
there is no returning from this country

of white gowns, crushed pills. There is a woman
who wears the face of someone I once knew
as my mother— but she lives in the silence

of snow. And now, someone calls me mother.
Small hands I hold each night,
as the dark passes through me. Am I not

the walls for my mother’s silhouette?
Every day my name is a ration
on the tongue. Every day

winter presses itself against my window
panes. Every day, wraps its hands around
my throat and threatens to call me home.