You said it was sentimental
As you crowded every corner
With plastic and cardboard and
Anything that anyone
was giving away.

As you moved stuff and things
into those spaces,
You moved my memories out.
And called them clutter.

The crazy daisy plates that were
my mother’s wedding gift,
the two blankets she made me,
the olive oil tin that was a gift
from my grandma, now rusted.

You placed the blankets my mom
quilted for me outside,
hidden in a laundry basket of stuff you forgot to wash,
but didn’t want to look at anymore.
You told me it was just the dog’s blankets.

When I found them,
they were dirty, faded, soaked and
falling apart at the seams.
The blankets she spent hours
looking for fabrics to show that despite
the distance she
understands me, the blankets she wove her
grief into for leaving because
she didn’t know how to stay.

Because her mom couldn’t stay either,
after he cracked her skull open
on the concrete floor, but somehow
left for something much much worse.
And she didn’t know how to stay
because her mom couldn’t protect her
or her sister from her uncle
whose mouth smelled like a rotting corpse.

Because her mother was stolen,
and raped into motherhood,
And taken across state lines,
and that’s just the way that things were.
Because her mother was trapped
as an indentured servant,
paying off her debt to board
her sick mother that recently became a widow.

She was raped into motherhood,
at the very same age that I was,
when my mother left. 

But you knew that,
those blankets were sentimental.