Mandy understands the taste of tears;
“salt of the earth” she says.
A mother’s gift

“and when pain becomes a burden— dig your fingers deep within her body,
bury them. Beneath red clay, stones, those mountains that grow
continuously until you are shadow’d into a child, again;
mound them over with sticks. Forget.”

Mandy climbed the ocean
when she was three, toddler still.
Fat-chubbed fingers reaching
for a mother that drowned
years before
her body floated up
from the depths of drugs, alcohol.
Mandy learned lessons standing
on the ledge— how the sea
can hold a body buoyant
even as it is drowning. How a mother’s
love isn’t always a guarantee

but there is an acceptance of sorts, from the rich of the earth.
How one can still grow into a woman without a woman’s hand to guide.
Even as breasts bud, she taught herself of a bond
with all that climbs up as ghosts, in the night air. Visits,
but what haunts her remains within.

Mandy has fallen in love. She thinks.
He is not soft, tender. Doesn’t
know the lullabies that she urges for.
“He’ll do” she cries

though, sometimes— when Mandy sleeps
her hands spread apart the soil
dig up the bones she buried,
holds them to her as the child she never was;
she is the waves of that ocean, then.
Mandy knows the taste of her own tears.

Melinda Blount
Ohio resident