Evening: I loaded the soiled plates,

playing
the doting Queen or
mother – ordering them into their places,
but not until
these fingers crossed the dirtiest one,
writing my elaborate initials in script and ketchup
momentarily. My mother ever watchful
reached from behind to rinse the letters away.

Morning: I emptied the clean plates,

playing
the fickle queen or
mother – pulling their round warmth
from domestic baptismal, and
scrawling my signature in the residual suds
momentarily. Her
thirsty dish towel,
finished dusting small fingerprints from the table,
swallowed my name away.

For years: The dishes

and my mother
played their game,
a Cartesian vortex of serving and being served,
washing and being washed,
and the mahogany table, begging to be sprayed
and soothed like an aging ingénue,
dutifully
offers its marred body –
evidence that children will be censored.

But not here and now:

where I load and unload myself each night
across this paper-thin table
with my daughter
a second grader whose dyslexia
requires she practice
her letters
with the regularity of a household chore.

I make note:

Steaming
inside every letter she writes
and re-writes
is a little girl today and decades ago
refusing
to ever be erased again.

Steaming
inside every bone cold plate I bury
in the cupboard
my mother, every mother.

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