Acanthus, a Latex Demigloss

But this is our house! I cry
Where we go when we want to be
Mothers and Daughters again.
I stage my most gruesome protest.

it's dirty gum color! naked spaghetti color!
and with what pudrid phoenetics:
BAAAY-JEEE-[BL]AAGH!
(nothing so magic as Navajo White)

but unfettered, or without choice
my mother begins the colorwashing.
In the kicking force of a child, failed
I throw arms out, walk to the street
pray for salvage, for some accident
that leaves a tattered corner bare

At the curb, I contemplate
meaty little histories lost
to that dingy lacquered veil

pencil lines of my height
at age seven, age nine
tiny blood-full cracks
from where Billy broke his head.
the dark, sun-spared rectangle
where the family portrait hung
until Papa took it with him

I come back to witness
the exit shade taking over
creeping up floorboards
eating through the walls and
swallowing the doorway whole;
charging through without knocking
scoffing the need to announce itself

'There is no warmth to this color,'
Mom concedes to my wet face
Adding stroke to half-dried stroke
in a joyless, chorelike fashion.
I know she can do it because
her heart is somewhere else
and because the Realtor said to.

Every chip, blotch and defect
is silenced under the sticky butter
of uniformity. It seems as effortless
as all that scarring had been
but swifter.

Her back to me
arms rising and falling
in the numbness of meditation
like she were scrubbing grass stains
from my blue jeans
in a tub of warm water

We are the stain to get out.