McLeod Logue

Mother of Thousands (Devil’s Backbone)

Mother tended the plants with bare knuckles.
Her pale wax skin, naked under the side shifted
light, warming our kitchen sink. I watched
her cut leaves and frilly stems from plants that reached
back to her. She preened and stroked them
the way she did when she used to cut my hair.
Black lines against the white mold of the tub, I loved
the hot water, how it warmed my neck from the inside,
how her hands held my head like an offering.
She hummed and traced her fingernails
against my scalp, sowing me clean.

I turn off all the lights to undress, bathing myself
in the pitch black dark of my own tub. Mother says
I’ll never bloom inside, in the dark. And now, I yank
my own hair loose when I touch it, strands of black sinking
down with the water, my knuckles scab from picking skin
down to the bone. My head is hot with nothing to cool me.
I simmer. The nape of my neck decaying into my body,
the cold water reflecting from my skin, steam rising.
I pluck my leaves one by one by one.

I’ve killed every plant I’ve ever owned.

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McLeod Logue is a creative writing MFA candidate and poet at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, her work is influenced by her family’s fine art, southern roots and attachment to location. McLeod's work has appeared in The Nashville Review, Passenger's Journal and is forthcoming elsewhere.