Diary Entry #31: Attachment Disorder

Maybe I’m not a mystery: I look

for the father in everyone. Come home

and hold me, I say to the exterminator

of all life. I point to the earth

where I’m told duende lives. I point

to the fog my shame has designed.

It is thick and joyless, a soup of ghosts. I’ve been sad

for too long. For too long, I’ve been

the kid who needed someone else

to buy her a meal at Bickford’s. I order

too much and apologize like I’m dragging a big truth

from under the cement slab in the yard,

my little dog finding the gopher hiding in the dark,

then whipping it in the air by the neck. Spin,

girl, spin, they say, the men who don’t love me.

And the truth? I believe in hell not heaven

because I only know how to perform

a burden. To cling is to build

an altar of collected things: this broken

crayon, that dull knife, another stained shirt.