When My Father Died

my mother built over me a worry
big as a hangar the concrete floors oceanic
but I mopped them every morning slick and lit
like sweat on a palm I do not remember
his hands and I will never
ask her if she remembers his hands

at night I would hear the steel walls
rasp the wind at night she would
unscrew all the light bulbs with her oven mitts
while we slept the closets yawned tendrils
of jet fuel and by 13 I was addicted
to plowing the clouds of …