Where Do Sons Come From ? 

by Alicia Fisher

It was vengeance, hot and dove – soft, that brought you
to the wide doomy edge, a lucid candle
standing Godtall and bleeding into its
brass: fire in the thighs, fire in the thumbs.  You were hungry and bruised and in
love with the certain grim tang that catastrophe
brings to your tongue.  You went one on one with the ghost.
Hamlet, I am the ivy snaked around your heart —
lovely white constrictor.  I make you nervous, but so do
crowds and black spirits — like the black ones
who raped me, say.  All while the ladies clacked across
the raw linoleum in their bright deaf heels —
So I can relate in a way.
Why the sky that day ?  Why did your father have to show up
in his battle robes ?  Good demon, be sweet and tell me — where does sugar
come from — ask me, ask me son!
Momma, why did you murder every last good
intention ?  I’ll give you fairy tales about slit lily throats, solid puke – logic.

Doves squeal in brutal ecstasy, a purgatory opera.
These are my golden breasts.  I go dead in the heart, go to the edge
and spread my legs wide for the sky: they say you do not have to be good
as long as you shimmer and sway in pure
lunar nakedness.  They say God will hand over the candle.
I will know then where my sad son came from, my boy
with his long fine fingers and strong tongue, his mad – dreams ringing dead bells,
dead bells in my womb’s – ear: raw sugar and silver
spoons can’t sweeten the fact that my only son has gone in –
sane, has gone like every ghost – harassed child before him up
to the safe shelf of his room where the wooden toy soldiers eat calamity
and scoop out their own crying eyes, slit their Achilles heels —
For all of fiction’s history: a ghost king.  So do
what the revisionist does, an every day simplicity — re – write me, me whom the black
spirits ravished.  It’s a given: my baby’s battered heart swelled
at that first Ophelia – taste.  It is done!  There is rape in the masses. There is
everywhere a mother who makes and breaks a son.