Family Portrait

These memories are paved into the dirt, etched in the souls of mountains, still and quiet, awaiting an avalanche to bring about a final sense of peace.

Like flesh pieces and blood clots, the cartilage of a carcass smashed and torn across a street— roadkill fragments perpetually pressed into the tar, waiting for the crows to feed.

My mother’s son—I was once him. A melting phantom, tethered to the past, searching for a connection, an understanding, or a glimpse of compassion.

My father but a fugitive shadow, that empty vessel encrypted by fear, moored in chaos and hate. A running coward climbing his own cross for his own destination.

So, drain the blood, scour me with bleach, and repeat. Generations go by, a cirrhosis of seasons, shadowed and marinated in the vomit, and left for all the dead to see.