poem: my father said he was going to the store, we needed milk

thirty day poetry challenge
day 04– ‘buy milk‘

I broke down, like my father’s car,
which had been breaking down again
and again, like my father
always broke down — in the parking lot
or the pharmacy queue — where his latest
prescription sat whore-ishly orange;
he prized them like my mother’s
tits or my grandfather’s slaps or
my own collection of aberrations,
in which I am
the loser, sitting pale and salt-pinched
at a large window, telling people I simply won’t
go through with something so Slyvia Plath —
electric shock therapy, please it was
one attempt and not even
a good attempt. The Lie is greased oil
and fluids in my crouch, spitting —
leaking onto the institution and my
Mary Jane’s; I look like my grandmother with these
pearl earrings, the 60s eyeliner
my eyes are glowing and bulbous, I swear I took
nothing in the bathroom earlier, my father took
the car out and said he would be back
in a little while — and who am I? God? To say that he
was lying? I am a whore
in the old-world way of his medicine,
lying naked and ready to be taken; you could read
Freud and Lacan in my unborn stomach
or the square-cut liberated dresses
I still, peevishly and historically, favor — I am
my father’s daughter; who can say
more than that?