What ticked inside my mother’s mother’s
brain to keep her calm enough to do the dishes
by hand? I won’t let this be another modern-day
poem about serotonin when it wants to be about
ancestral anger, about my mother’s breast
cancer, about my grandmother’s yellow house
dress with the pocket, about pockets –
the pockets of my brain that leak serotonin,
my mother’s breast the surgeon left behind,
a ticking pocket, leaking fluid, the calm
house my mother grew up in, her mother
seething like a kettle on a gas stove, hands
in suds, a drying cloth soured near the sink.
What do you think we kept private, all three
of us – what do you think we keep quiet
and tucked away until the steam
screams from an ultrasound machine?