The rain dances along my mother’s roof
And she says it is God crying.
Palms pressed together in prayer,
Peonies sprout from her knuckles,
Briny in their birth.
She hangs our linens in the storm
And watches her knuckles crack into calcite
And harden into pearls.
Her cheekbones, bitter and brittle,
Are of stale nutmeg and spider’s silk.

Across ridges and rivers and roads,
We mourn the spring like she is ours.
The willows weep into their drenched roots,
Their cries a cacophony,
Symphony swelling like ripe fruit.

June is an angel’s name, spoken like whiskey on the tongue
And poppies in my honey-blond hair.
My mother pinned them in when I was budding with the summer
Before salt caked our cheeks
And we wailed with the twilight cicadas,
Before we stumbled to the church
Where the patron saint of anguish could plague
The wake of our youth.

The summer lodges herself under my nails,
Gritty, stubborn and sweltering.
She beats in time to the downpour,
Whispers under her breath
In a language I can no longer speak.
Her voice swirls into brine and pools in the rafters.
It’s been a season since I have drowned.