FAULT LINE

I was a house built on a fault line
and I called the shaking weakness.
I didn’t know the sky had a ceiling.
I didn’t know the soil was a ledger
tracking my debt
before I learned the currency of my own name.

For thirty years I tried to map the road,
not knowing the asphalt was cut
with the ash of my grandmothers
to make it smooth enough
for other people’s tires.

And you.
The women before the cage.
You waited below me like groundwater.
In my lungs.
In the hinges of my knees.
In the iron taste of survival.

I mistook inheritance for instinct.
I thought I was alone inside myself.

The world was built like a velvet cage.
Soft enough to stroke.
Soft enough to sleep inside.
The bars disappeared into everything:
lipstick stains on coffee cups,
magazine smiles with their teeth filed down,
dreams ground down into diaper changes.

By the time I arrived,
the prison looked like furniture.

Mom,
you were born in 1946
into a room with no windows.
No one called it a prison then.
It was just called life.
I saw your blue eyeshadow
and thought: performance.
Your piano fingers.
Your jazz hands.
Your laugh too loud in the wrong places.
I thought it was falseness.
I didn’t know glamour could be camouflage.
I didn’t know some women survived
by turning themselves into chandeliers,
all light,
all breakable pieces.

I hated the fear in your house.
The way your anger arrived before you did.
My brother and I learned to read weather
from the sound of cabinets closing.
I wanted you to protect us.
I wanted you to roar.

But you were a bird
smashing itself against glass,
thinking the reflection was the enemy.
And I still don’t know
if you knew the glass was there.

I will never know
where you began.
What silence trained into your spine.
What vanished from you
before you became my mother.

I thought your violence was cruelty.
Now I think it was voltage
with nowhere safe to go.
Spraying sparks everywhere
but at the warden.

And still,
there are nights I ache with the child-part of me
that wanted a mother large enough
to stand between me and the world.

A mother with teeth.
A mother who would burn the whole house down
before letting the smoke reach her children.
Instead, the fire came through you.

Shame scratches at my ribs
like something trapped in the walls.
I want to howl loud enough
to wake my ancestors sleeping in my bones.

Ancestors,
how did you carry this knowledge
without splitting apart?
How did you keep loving people
who could not see the cage?

My children will not inherit my silence.
And some nights it feels impossible,
learning how to roar
when no one roared for you.
Learning tenderness
from women who survived by going numb.
Learning safety
from women who had none.

Mom,
I cannot untangle your soul
from the world that broke it.
I cannot know the woman
you might have been
if someone had opened a window.

But I see you now.
Not clearly.
Never clearly.
Like looking at someone through warped glass.
But enough to know
you carried the line forward bleeding.

I was a house built on a fault line.
My children will be built on fire.
Their walls will need no chandeliers.
They will be the light.