that snip

our daughter isn’t well my mother says to him, as if each part of the phrase wasn’t a separate cutting, because let’s parse this, i haven’t been their daughter for years, but can live with being their child; can live with being they, but to live with being their child, really, is a cutting, like the bleeding of the tree in our backyard when i whipped at it with a jump rope, over and over to see the white running down, each mark a wet line, and what else, really, because there’s no sense to be made of speaking, because our [...] isn’t well, and am i really theirs, or the product of their cutting, because our daughter isn’t [...], born instead from generations of smoke and snakes, all the generations at once, all lying, every iteration of [...] [...] isn’t well, and what is well, and can we store the wet there in a bucket not a basket; the contents of well rot from cutting, all dying, but what [...] [...] isn’t [...] .