My Mother Sobs

My mother sobs,
and I feel the weight of her trials draped across my shoulders.
She talks in broken sentences,
and her tears like a guzzling steam seep through my shirt.
I rub her back tenderly and stare at the wall behind her.
No tears build in my eyes,
and my heart doesn’t beat fast,
and I do not feel it.
“I have never felt this broken” she says.
And I think about all the times our life has been torn to pieces.
“I have never felt so lost” she says.
She grieves for the man who is still living.
Living another life, sprawled out in the arms of another.
And I think about the times he blackened her eyes
and ripped out her hair with whiskey on his lips.
Yet, she has never felt so broken
And I think about the nights spent in broken down apartments
on couches that smelled like piss and cigarettes.
And moving from place to place.
Yet, she has never felt so lost.
As those memories flood back to me,
I am drowning in confusion and numbness.
And I am drowning in my mother’s sorrows,
as her tears soak through my shirt,
and her sobs echo off the walls around us.