“Tell your father he needs to stop drinking,”
the mother told her daughter.
The daughter wrote a note to her father
and taped it to a bottle of rum.
It read, ‘daddy, please stop drinking.’
When the little girl checked the bottle
the very next day,
the note had been torn off —
only the corners with tape remaining.
“Tell your daughter-in law to take out her husband food,”
the father in-law said to the mother in-law.
The daughter in-law placed her husband’s food
on the table, and asked him to eat.
The husband ignored her
Dropping cubes of ice into his glass —
Clink, clink,
the rum poured over the ice,
into the soda
Swirling into the same shade of brown
Behind the mist in her eyes.
“Tell us mommy,” the daughters said, “is daddy sick?”
The mommy looked at the daddy
laying asleep on the bed,
skin thin and yellow —
a papery sheet over his diseased liver.
She looked back at her little girls,
Into their curious, warm, brown
eyes
And saw herself in them.
She reached out,
extended her arms and embraced her children
for a long, long time.
writingsformydaughters 