One year since pity moved
into the present tense, and my mother
into the past. I don’t lie when people ask
the natural questions of family life, until
the awkward question of how long is broached.

When am I allowed to live again?
Reanimated after falling
into the river, nothing more
than a childlike memory
that gets reconstructed day
by day as I relearn how to speak.

Frankenstein was always about a child
and her mother. The irresponsible
science was just a ploy to get men
to care the slightest bit about
a creation myth that wasn’t made
from their rib. I know that,

but they didn’t. The others in that house
wet with rain instead of sick,
although both stick to the skin
and linger longer than they’re welcome.
I don’t know if Shelley would’ve
Understood me. I don’t think she and I
would get along in the slightest,
two stubborn women butting heads
while both claim to be revolutionary.
Reminds me of my mother, or hers.

At the Tower Records on Dawson Street
I told a friend I thought it was a terrible movie—
that I felt like womanhood was more than
being a baby and getting your brains fucked into you
by Mark Ruffalo. I’m sorting out
what the word “woman” means, or if I am one,
but there has to be more to life, isn’t there?

She disagreed with me,
not about the definition of womanhood,
but about what the film meant, and what regaining
things after you’d lost them looked like.
What is the shape of all of this being, and what
do we make space for?

One year into resurrection
and I don’t know if I believe in it at all—
this world where there’s no number to call
when things get screwy, no one to return to
when your mind is stuck in the black and white.
something monstrous happened. I am still
remembering what it’s like to watch love decay.

I don’t know how to accept these pithy sympathies.
These are the facts of a life reborn,
in a place where she’d never been,
and where nobody knows who I was
when she was still here.

Abbie Langmead (she/they) is a Sapphic Jewish writer originally from Boston, MA, currently living in Dublin, Ireland. Their poetry has recently appeared in Shot Glass Journal, Northern New England Review, Trace Fossils Review, and many others. Find them in those places, wandering, or hosting dinner parties in her too crowded apartment.