Alarm Pattern
Jessica Bixel
Let’s say I’m the bitter daughter
and motionless the winter will agree
she doesn’t know how to be anything
else. What sort of failure is giving up,
we wonder. What sort of mother?
And if I shear off my hair and burn it,
am I like her? Somehow we are
each of us stuck exactly where she left us,
my hand on a pair of scissors.
We were made for our own small fists.
Jessica Bixel is between some lines of latitude and longitude. She is a recent Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee and her work can be found in Best New Poets 2015, Whiskey Island, Wildness, and Grist Journal, among others.