literature

Dead Mothers

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manchaliaina's avatar
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Literature Text

I've been dreaming dead mothers. Night after night
I lay my head down and, instead of sleeping, dream
a woman being killed. The death is always sudden.
Either disease - a sudden onset, a quick decline - or murder
at the hands of bandits. There's no other kind of violence,
no rape or anything. Just the death of someone's mother
and then grieving.

The first night it was my boyfriend's mother. I don't
have a boyfriend, but his mother got sick of cancer
suddenly, one night, and he called me at four in the morning
to say, "Kyla, my mother's dying." And I said, "What?
How?" the way my mother says What?! when she hears bad news,
with indignation in her voice, as if daring the world to really
kill her people off like that. "Kyla, she's got cancer, she's dying."
And I said something like, "Oh Jesus," or "Oh, hon," something
American and wrong for four in the morning in Lahore,
and he just cried or was silent, I couldn't tell on the phone,
and then he said, "Can I come over?"

Of course I said yes, because in my dreams, I save
everyone. No matter the words I've wasted saying I won't
save the boy, I always save the damn boy
of my dreams, so he came over and lay down next to me
and I realized at this point in the dream that we'd
never made love before. I thought oh shit, both inside
and outside the dream, because he was vulnerable
and wrapped around me and I just wanted him all inside -

In my dream, he woke up in the morning and I had two versions
about whether or not we made love. But we brushed our teeth
before kissing and then he went to the hospital. Two days later,
or three, or five, his mother died.


*


Last night was worse. I got into bed at four in the morning
and didn't sleep and dreamed I was at my boyfriend's mother's
funeral (I don't have a boyfriend) when my father called to tell me

When my father called to tell me.


It is taboo in this land, you see, to talk about dreams of the dead.
If you dream the dead and repeat the dream, the gates of Heaven may
open to your mouth and you may bring chaos, you may bring end.
Black is the tongue that says a death before it's done.


- when my father called to tell me that my stepmother
had been killed
by terrorists (black the tongue)
who cut off her head (I have a stepmother)
without warning (she works in Afghanistan)
and we got no chance at ransom.
I had this dream while waking
and I couldn't stop it and it wouldn't stop
and black the tongue that says these things out loud.

My fictional boyfriend took his dead mother's body out of his front gate
with his brothers (I gave him brothers) and saw me standing there,
mobile in my hand and mouth gaping, and came back
from burying his mother and took me away.

In my catatonia, in my waking dream.

He drove me home.


*


Black the tongue that knows no better.


*


Last night, in my black-tongue dream, I arrived home
from a long way away, brought by my boyfriend - whom,
I realized, no one had met -

                              and she was home!
And not dead, or kidnapped, her head still attached
and I ran and burrowed into her and stayed for hours.

I don't know where I put my boyfriend, in my dream.
But later he sat with us, he missed his mother.


*


I woke up this morning with swollen eyes and narrative difficulty.
It seems the news of my stepmother's death had been a false alarm,
a scare tactic, and between the funeral and my arrival home, it had all
been sorted out. But I find this suspicious. I find black magic afoot,

black hearts at work. The pornography of death imagined
is too strong. The grieving heart, the return home. The son
shouldering the mother's coffin. The ground, dug for good.
These things are magnetic and cloying, they don't let go, for all
the black tongue taboo, all the real-time love.

When I was a child, a real child and not a dream,
I killed my mother and father in all manner of catastrophe,
nightly, and would run crying to my father then, who would
hold me close and tell me no one was dying,
they would never die, while my stepmother giggled
at my stories. Whether I thought then that she was
indestructable, or all too killable for me to kill off
of a night, I don't know.


*


I woke up this morning with swollen eyes
and I worry for sleep. If someone else dies
in my mind without me closing my eyes, I think

the morning will change colour on me. The days
are beautiful, the breeze is flowers and spring.

But it rains suddenly, pours down torrents, and before
you know it, winter's in.
...
© 2007 - 2024 manchaliaina
Comments10
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baltoscamplover4ever's avatar
i dont completly understand your poem... im going to assume this was all just dreams?