Brenda Cárdenas

Her mother is sick,
and she cannot make mama better.
The girl thinks maybe she is the hammer
pounding in her mother's head,
the parasite upsetting her tummy.

She wants to squirm up
on mama's lap
like when she was small,
tell her how much she hates
the new school, the new math,

but mama swallows
those white pills
and stares at the walls
or locks herself in her room
holding her head,
the shades pulled tight.

At night they both listen
for her father. Sometimes, his keys
never clank against the lock.
Or she hears his heavy feet,
his slurred words
a few hours before her alarm.

For the next five years, he will sleep
with slim women not even a decade
older than his teenage daughter,
drink up grandma's money,
and pretend it will end.

Mama will try to erase him
from the face of her first child,
but he will dwell there
in the flare of her nostrils,
the black-brown swish of her hair,
the deep set flash of her eyes.

Mama will try to press them
both from her temples,
block them out with the light,
but the child will throb
in her mother's migraines,
hide in the deep curve of an ovary,
in the lining of her heart.