In the night garden 

Some nights I commune with the ghost
of my mother’s younger self.
She floats in the cold half-light,
like a Rose of Sharon,
serene in her surrender.

In this dreamscape,
I touch the splicing on her torso,
where a ribbon of jute binds her graftings.
We walk hand in hand beneath
the glass and mirrors
of the sprawling greenhouse.

This is where they pursued her
with their pruning hooks,
this is where copper wires bound her limbs,
this is where they cleaved women like her
on the diagonal.

My mother in her twenty-third spring
surrendered to the night garden,
raindrops like wedding beads in her hair—
a bride paraded in the purest veils.

Expectations clung to her like strangling ivy
as her laughter grew muted beneath
the weight of years,
eventually silenced—brittle to the ear.
She began to exist
in chapters authored by others.

Flee, young one, flee,
she whispers to me from the furrows.
She knows there is a world beyond
this bedraggled Eden
where ivy creeps beyond the concrete,
where vast savannas of women thrive
wild and strong as the river gums,
their canopies braided with stars
with no one to hack
at their reaching branches.

I move my hands over my uncut torso,
over the dark valleys between my ribs,
and wonder where the hatchet will fall
when my turn comes.

Every night, in the mirror,
I study the map of my body
like a cartographer charting unsullied lands.
I trace the contours of my throat,
where anger rises like a feral river.
I draw the folds of my hands
that ball up in defiant fists.

She leads me to the edge, my mother,
and lets me go.

And when I wake, I run
far beyond that bedraggled paradise
with its broken prisms and tumbled glass,
where the hibiscus droops,
disguising hidden shears.

And I don’t stop until my lungs ignite,
until the voice of my mother’s younger self
diffuses into an exhale of relief
the moths carry into the mist.