for alice

on the marriage certificate
his name reads

Andrew

but no one really knows
for sure
not all the women on my mother's side
who have mourned
these generations
loving men
so hard
into vanishing

listening to women read poems about
motherhood
infanticide
sex
father's suicides
and
salvia
at 8.30 in the morning
is uncomfortable
more now than it ever
was when i thought of
myself
as a poet
when i was a younger woman
in my twenties

i used to find fancy in ideas
words
like the fact that there's a graphy
in the word
geography
(that's a real word nerd joke, if you can
find enough
to find it)
and in things like
the fact that i used
word as an identical rhyme
i used to think my writing
found some kind of newsbreak
sound and sense
i said
all whispers and cold fingers and html coding
horrorshowpoetrynightmaregirlfriend
now
there is only this
the consciousness
of the consciousness
that there's a sound and a sense in it all

your searches
are really
starting
to weird me out