My mother’s face. The bladed cheekbones, the dancer’s neck, the crowded eyes. What about the rest of her? My mother carried within herself gothic mass, sclerotic and stillborn, the dead child of motherless. Motherless lived inside my mother, beside her. In these motherless places dark things grew, which I would liken to empty swimming pools overrun by weeds and spiky grass sprouting from cracks and fissures, a hothouse for entropy. My mother was an empty swimming pool, a hollowed-out cavity where swimming was forbidden. When you see a waterless pool, knowing you can’t swim in it, what do you do? What I did was stare and stare, becoming a pair of haunted desperate eyes, and used my imagination to fill the pool with water, a mirage submerged. I cannot count how many times I drowned inside my mother. Or rather inside her motherless places, grip-locked.