Our Inheritance

The blood of slaughtered women is running through my veins.
There is too much of it.
It bursts my arteries. It pounds in my head.
It chokes my heart. My father shed this blood.
My grandfather shed this blood.
I've drawn some of it into myself.
My mother put her hand through the telephone
and opened a wound in my neck.
I'd been hurting her with a jagged voice,
demanding to be rid of this blood.
A little girl lowers herself from a treebranch.
The tree is planted in a fog.
I'm there to catch her but I don't know what I'm standing on.
She trusts me. She doesn't know what I've done to her mother
or what her mother's done to me.
A beam of red light comes blazing
from the tear duct in her left eye.
It heals the gash in my neck. My arms go limp
and she tumbles into a pile of leaves
rapidly materializing. She is giggling and glowing like a light
from under the ocean.
She rises on her tiny feet and says into my eyes
"again, again. Pick me up and drop me again."
"It's fun." She's turning into a woman before my eyes.
Forgive me before I hurt you again, I beg.
She laughs at me and says "I want to play"
but the child in her face is growing confused.