Crying on my mother’s shoulder
At night in the summer in a heatwave
Choking on air and Polaroid film
Is the closest thing I’ve got to living
I repeat her name, a mantra, don’t forget
Don’t trust what I think once the sun falls
It’ll kill me like it kills her if I listen to advice 
From headless bedroom objects, the dead flys
And the ghost of my child-self screaming
For someone to hold her head gently above
The blue late June haze and the lack of
Diagnosis and understanding. The restlessness
The dreams and suicide pacts, pinky promises
With the hand-me-down dolls on the dresser
Sunbleached and faces wiped out of existence
Hand-me-down a pill bottle and a body
I wasn’t living then, barely at all, too young
To articulate my sense of self and now I
Am just a picture of my mother distorted
Through a couple decades aside and
A camera that prints the people all wrong