Leslie Lindsay
My face looks startling like my mother’s.
High cheekbones, blue eyes, a ski-slope nose.
I’d look at my reflection,
In a mirror.
Full mouth, luminous teeth.
Good genes.
But fear coursed my veins.
Would I be crazy like her?
If I told you I ached for a different mother,
I’d be lying.
I ached for my own,
Every minute.
She once thought she killed the postman.
It was an accident,
She didn’t mean to.
She said she was going crazy
And did I want to go with?
She asked if I wanted to do something wild
The fleshy knob at her neck
As she leaned forward
Over burgers and milkshakes
Her braying laughter,
Head thrown back with ecstasy.
Eyes like mine, only more electric.
Her lips curled into a grimace,
Only more sinister.
She said I was the devil and maybe, she’d kill
Me.
Is that what I wanted?
She thought the sun could heal her,
Golden brown.
Exquisite and glimmering.
In the absence of the sun,
There was a lamp.
And what pierces the skin,
but particles and molecules,
Dust.
Orbiting into her vortex
Ashes to ashes.
***
Leslie Lindsay is a mother, wife, and writer living in Chicagoland. Leslie is the award-winning author of Speaking of Apraxia (Woodbine House, 2012). Her work has been published in The Awakenings Review, Pithead Chapel, Common Ground Review, the Ruminate blog, Cleaver Magazine (both craft and CNF), The Nervous Breakdown, Manifest-Station, The Mighty, and forthcoming in Brave Voices Literary Magazine. Leslie is at work on a memoir about her mentally ill interior decorator mother and eventual suicide. She reviews books widely and interviews authors weekly, www.leslielindsay.com. Leslie is a former child/adolescent psychiatric R.N. at the Mayo Clinic.