IN JUPITER IT RAINS

n i n e t e e n

There is a monument of my mother I keep

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in the form of my being,      every day     I touch the smooth exterior of my skin and scrub it raw to make her temple gleam alabaster marble. Tuck the wild half curls around my neck and knot it around me to clean the shutters of the pillars my throat has become.      Every evening      I look at these hands that      touch me     and I try and scratch my mother's wisdom into the marble arch of my brow - stick my fingers into rosebushes just to feel the sting. To design the chips of aging marble. I limestone cover her in the showers of summer rain    too hot      to replenish the   hungry      at her door and too cold to      quench     the ache of my spine.                               Carrying my mother has become a penance I seldom acknowledge. I am never done making her 

perfect, 

never can decide in what lighting she would look most herself - and mother may I please just sit down for a moment? Because I don't know how you carry Atlas in one hand and your heart in the other. 

And the beggars are begging at the door for mercy but I'm too lost in this darkness to find you in this 

                 catacomb tunnel called me.