Choose Your Own Adventure

Poems aren’t puzzles. Disagree
if you want & if you do
see line nineteen where
you’ll find my mom, drunk again
the night she pitched a log
through our kitchen window, scaring
the shit out of five-year-old me
& my dad, who’d locked her out
& took the phone off the hook after
finding her belligerent in the breezeway.
Let’s say it was June. Let’s say
the lilacs were in bloom. Let’s say
something was cracked
deep inside her, dark-deep,
something about the bitter winters
of her girlhood, the battered bedroom
where her older brother slid in unbidden
beside her, so she lurched outside,
skulked to the back where she kept
bottles in the woodpile, where darkness
put that log in her arms. If you want
an answer here, see line one.
If you believe in beauty, see line twelve.
If you think she regretted smashing
that window or anything else,
I’m sure of it & I wish she hadn’t
lost herself to fury, I wish
I could give her June lilacs
& poems like puzzles that solve
themselves, but she’s dead,
my dad too & questions ring
unanswered in the echo of lines ten
& sixteen, in the click of the door’s
thick lock & the shard-crash
of glass, in the echo of this story
& all the rest, my choice
to write them, her choice
to live them, choices
we never thought we’d make.