The target poem.

Words pour from a
deep dark cave of time.
Echoes of sixty years
make my skin crawl,
cause my flesh to feel afraid.

Words all around me that
won’t go away.
Forgiveness does not remove them.
“I wish you had never been born
into this world” she said.

Eighty-five years of denial.
Eighty-five years of creating
a different reality.
A life of goodness and virtue, she says.

The butcher knife came at me,
shaking in a hand so small yet so threatening.
I could have taken the knife in my heart
much easier than her words.

She knows.
At some level, she knows,
but wonders why we are not close.
Wonders why I’m not like “other
daughters.”
All other daughters are perfect
but not I.