Inheritance
Sometimes my father
was a slapdash carnival,
mercurial, dangerous,
and still my house of mirrors.
He was the thing built up
and then torn down,
reinventing himself
time after time.
He thought I would be
the second coming.
But when I was born a girl
my mother finally realized
he needed to be hospitalized.
I kept my father’s blanket
folded in a closet
and rarely spoke of it.
Would it soothe me
to put my apocalypse
of the heart into words?
Not an ending
but an unveiling
of something that was always
waiting inside me, the thing
I was most afraid of
because it runs in the dark hollows
of my blood where I keep my secrets.
The thing that made me crumble
as it unfolded over my son.
*
Laura Denny is a retired kindergarten teacher who lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. She is a docent for Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. She loves to hike and forest bathe in the Redwoods near her home. Her poetry has appeared in Pictura Journal, Sunlight Press, Remington Review, Last Leaves Magazine, Orchards Review, Amethyst Review, and Macrame Literary Journal.
