I learned to forgive the night sky
because she did not save me
from a mother who could not love,
no matter how many stars I counted,
diamonds in the blue, my forevers forgotten.
No curses. No dancing on her grave
as she did on her mother’s before.
Instead, I turned from her ashes and flew
down the highway to rangelands. Dancing
on the hopes of my children’s laughter.
But sometimes, baking bread at midnight,
wedging knife into the oak-topped table,
beating the soft dough with barefists,
queen of the eyesores and unwept dreams,
I remember how she shaped fragile loaves,
a childhood rising and rising again, turning sour:
3-D glasses, red and blue, shark week,
the smell of cheap lipstick, home perms,
and never enoughs. The ghosts that linger
in my kitchen, hissing while I bite
my lip and wait for her to dissolve
back into the dishwater and swirl down
the slow drain. A local priest said he could not
exorcise her from our home,
not until every trace of her body was burned.
Ashes aren’t enough. She’s in every mirror.
Sage and fire and prayer. Three times around
smoke clearing the air. But I can still hear
her laughter. It follows me in the voice
of my daughters and sons. Love me. Forgive me.
Love me. I’m sorry. Love me.
Danelle Lejeune is a wanderer, a beekeeper, a farmer, and a mother who gave up on art for nearly twenty years until an alligator in the marshes off the coast of Georgia convinced her to look twice. Since then she has been published in Literary Mama, Red River Review, and Fifth Wednesday Journal. She’s been a poet in residence at Vermont Studio Center, attended Charles University in Prague, and is the assistant to the Director at Ossabaw Writer’s Retreat.