Work Text:
Sometimes all that anger dissipates,
Churns like butter under harsh blades of metal oppression
Blended with flour depression
That pushes me
To crumble
Other times
A memory flys back and hits my apron
Sticky and wet
Like the way your eyes pushed me down
Shorter and smaller
In frosting too sweet
To eat
I drown in sugar roses
Someone stole from this
Cake
My removed presence
Looks at that child I used to be
Looks at the adult I’ve grown into
And the way you never looked at either
As anything other
Then mess
The by-product of a recipe
Made by someone else’s hands
A recipe gone bad,
Running torn silk and
Spilt milk,
Needing to be mopped up
But you never did.
You stepped over me like water and broken glass
The one spill you refused to clean up
Maybe
I’d be less angry
If you tried to fix it
Like you made sure to fix
Everyone else’s kitchens
At least then, even though that still would have felt wrong-
I would have ended up somewhere
I sort of belonged
To someone
Who valued me
Enough
To try
But all you ever did was lie
And give me that look
Like I wasn’t really there
Like I was a hair
In the food
You happened to be next to
-A dish on your sisters plate
Beyond hope
Disposably adorable in all my inherited “selfish failures”
Nothing but frosting
And smoke
In lungs that couldn’t breathe here!
…In this air
In this forsaken state
Sometimes the anger dissipates…
Like the flame on birthday cake
Other times
It flickers
Into shame
Takes on your name
Or the ones you used to use for me
I don’t think I’d be this angry
If I didn’t care so much
If I didn’t love you so much
If your home wasn’t the refuge
My mind ran to again and again
But…
All this time
You dressed me up
In something you called love
Like a doll stuck in a cake
Like every pretty plate
Like that mistake
You were never going
To admit
Like a present you didn’t give much thought to,
Something frivolous and disposable
For the brat of a child you always saw me as, something fragile and bound to crack
Inside a broken cardboard box
That you felt obligated to keep a little space for
That someone would take away one day
And you could change the locks
To your heart, your car, your doors
You could finally sweep the floors
Of any shards leftover
Because I was
Leftovers
To you
Your home was
Wrapped
In robins egg blue
Tied with a hot red bow
That I thought offered warmth…
It didn’t though
It’s color was a hoax
A fireplace for show and not for heat
Like the one on your TV
At Christmas
False like sanctuary
Just as cold
As all the memories
On that god forsaken
Empty prairie
Sometimes this anger dissipates
Other times it lingers… leaving a full sickly feeling. Too much frosting. Too much cake.
Memories I wish were never made.