That woman in the picture looks like me
but she is older and really: it’s me.
She could be my mother’s sister
if we compared the two at 40.
There are 25 years between us
and I am, of course, her daughter,
the only daughter of an only daughter.
She is the seamstress daughter of a seamstress’s daughter
and on and on and on back.
But I don’t have the patience for the needle & thread, the machine.
I didn’t have the patience for home, either,
to outlive the teenage me they could not seem to let go of,
the one that still haunts me when I visit.
The one inner-me looks like and the one
I am jealous of – most of my choices have been made:
now I just have to live with them.
If you are only a blood daughter (or not even that)
you stop talking to your mother
when you realize you cannot forgive
that she is not even haunted
just the same, dulled a bit from age.
She became immutable long ago, set in stone,
like the words that grace her final marker,
like the words that filled her diaries day after day
and the stitches she sewed to hold it all together.