New Jersey 12, or Poem Draft

audience

it's 2am,
exactly fourteen minutes before inspiration descends
on my eyelids and my fingertips.
i write a lot of poems blind,
exhaustion protecting these drafts from critique until morning.

i am at home. by which i mean
i am not paying to live here.
there are political cartoons from 2003
on my walls, which are yellow,
a color i stopped liking in eighth grade.

i am home. by which i mean
at 2am, my mother is my only audience.
sometimes, i read to her,
a child still inclined to show off
the handprints she has pressed into plaster
and painted green.
efforts made beautiful
only by a mother’s affection.

my mother
has begun to hate my poems.

i have put her mother's eroding body,
my sister's barbed teeth,
and my sex life
on stages in front of audiences absent of her.

andrea admits
she's never invited her parents to a single poetry show.
jonida confesses
her mother has never seen her work in English.
sonya believes
in the memory of her mother’s crossed, unyielding arms.

we, poets,
slice the available skin
from our mothers’ necks,
stretch it like drums to beat in the silences of her pulse.

how cruel of me,
to show my mother her own jugular
and expect her applause.