“you look just like/your mother,” he says,“who looks like a fire/of
suspicious origin.”
—from “A Violence,” Nicole Sealey
My mother looked like a woman, a nicely made
woman in her neat turquoise slacks and size 4 shoes,
buttons never hanging by a thread, her face bearing
evidence of everything she feared—up escalators,
finding her way in a strange place, leaving the house.
But she was a fire, an earthquake, an electric storm—
battering the roof with hail, sending blue balls of light,
unraveling skeins of static yarn rolling across the room.
She sent the poltergeist trudging up the stairs, stopping
outside my door like a persistent sleepwalker.
Most of all, she was a voice, telling stories, singing,
teaching me to get the language right,
pin the world in place with words.
Every workday, my father climbed the cellar stairs
at evening, saying “Shut up Lydia. You too, bitch,”
meaning me. All the power of her words couldn’t
keep my father’s belt from lashing at my legs and back.
She spoke less and less, mostly muttered to herself
under her breath in two languages. I saw it all.
I was the message in a bottle sent into the world
to speak her truth. It was my job to plot escape.
She filled me with the family lore. Her silence
turned her to a force that could not be contained,
especially in that small a space, the pressure
mounting underground, voice trapped
behind those perfect teeth, behind the fear
of uttering the unacceptable, the dangerous—
how my father’s family left us to our fate,
wanting to hide the shame, the family
madness, truth that everyone could see
but didn’t want to hear or say.
When a woman is stifled for so long,
the voice will curdle in her chest
and make of her a fire of suspicious origin,
smelling of gasoline and melted plaster.
Her face becomes a crime scene, evident
to anyone who reads the signs, speaking
all the outrage of those who outwardly
accept their fate. Broken wires spark
a conflagration. I must trace the fire
to its origin. I am the arsonist. I am the match.
