My mother bled for a country who stood on her back.
My mother hid in her bedroom with the door closed
from the country that made her mind turn traitor,
unable to escape her own thoughts.
My mother became a city under siege, her mouth
a bomb shelter, her tongue a loaded gun.
Her eyes are sirens screaming in the dark,
her hands are machetes cutting and cutting
into her own flesh, breaking her open like a plum
or a country we are afraid to name,
her insides scraped clean by the bayonets of guilt,
her insides consumed by everything with a mouth.
