Mother

Kat Deiter


Your song
Skates down the river
Flowing like warm milk
Through a cord
I climb

Through the gentle, shining gray
the dreamy quiet of falling snow
Where boats briefly appear and suddenly vanish

Plucked from the net
I am scrubbed raw and twisted
Silk flesh chewed quickly 
Brine blood savored and swallowed

Let me tell you about the siren
Her violent kingdom
Of bleach and silence 

A dream
Of being chased down a corridor of locked doors
And disappearing furniture 

An empire of rage
and two little girls 
embraced tightly against cracked glass 

About: Kat Deiter is a mixed Peepeekisis Cree and Ojibwe writer whose work explores memory, haunting, and the tension between inheritance and identity.