Stepmother

1.

Close your eyes
and count to spring.

Then, ready or not:
grind us into flower,

shove us in the oven
to bloom like bread.

Brother, I have seen her
impatient at the window

rosemary in her hand
like a votive branch.

2.

It is not my house anymore
with its pinebox smell.

She has redecorated my children
with bruises like juniper berries,
stony winter fruit

and the needles envy-green.

3.

We were given nothing but
water and sunlight for a week
and she could not understand
how we hadn’t grown up.

It should have worked, Sister.

Instead, our skin turned to potato peels,
our knuckles tubercular as ginger roots
and dirt under our fingernails.

4.

Nothing can wheel the
millstones of my heart.

Threshed until son,
daughter came loose
then lost.

I will scatter flour
over the yard
until they return.

Author of the article

Lindsay Lusby has published work in The Coachella Review and The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review. When she is avoiding her writing, she likes to print with antique letterpress, tinker with typewriters, bind books, and read and read and read until she falls asleep on the dog. She is the Assistant Director of The Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. She blogs at www.ontopofgoosehill.blogspot.com.