On the bus, my mother presses her forehead
against the one-eyed vulture in the glass
Missed calls,
funeral bills,
old pockets that smell of
pennies. We talk about medications
like relatives no one wants to see.

Don’t look
at the creature’s wrinkles
the burn scars along its neck and face
like rusted train tracks,
its wet eyes
hungry for decades-old debts.
Instead
look out the window:
the dollar store sandals in cardboard boxes,
the McDonalds
with the bullet-cracked window,
the brick church
where we lowered our heads
and pretended to be saved for a free meal.

Two decades ago,
I sat on a plastic crate in front of a mirror
and saw the vulture for the first time
as you combed through the knots in my hair
and told me about a home I’d never know:
the boot prints on your father’s
back, the broken ribs and red books,
the woman in the red dress
purple-faced in the river,
the dogs,
the teeth,
the hunger,
splintery shovels and
midnight gunshots,
inky hands never clean
shaking under paper-thin sheets
a baby, not me, crying for milk
its tiny mouth swallowing gulps of
hot air as the flies circled over the dirt, waiting

Ma, you asked me then
if I was happy
the vulture’s claw to your throat,
eyes the green of kerosene burns

You already knew then, didn’t you?
When the magician combs his hair and
asks his reflection to pick a card
he’s practicing how to fool himself
A person could spend a lifetime
trying to figure out what the final trick is.