Sliding walls

I dream about her in the form of wells I keep falling into.
She is dark and stone walled with slippery tiles meant for your spirit to slide down as it tries climbing back up to the light inside of her.
Deborah. Greek name: Ebony Colored Evil.
Her fallen children sit inside the bottom of her
chanting well songs she has echoed down to each one of them every time she opens up the beginning of her pain.
Chant:
Little girls hear whispers
Watch for the demons that prey
Little girls hear whispers
Tell them its okay.
We never learn whether she’s the little girl or the demon
But I, as a little girl,
am commissioned to serve her tall glasses of room temperature water
while she lying in a hot bath,
clinging to porcelain,
pleads to God to plunge her from this earth.
I am chosen out of three to witness her ritualized pain
because my skin is sinewy thick with plastic feelings
that keep her tears and sweat from ever saturating me.
I demonize her because it is easy.
Because in truth I want Ebony-Colored Evil to cradle me in her arms
no matter how much the soot from her past gets all over me.
And just for a second, I am up close enough to see her
sitting at a dinner table
eight years old
wanting butter on her mash potatoes and for someone to tell her “it’s okay”.
A navy blue black beginning to appear just above her brow.
Three decades later,
she is covered in abandonment,
her need to be loved depressed into the hole in which we now sit,
chanting.
We, her fallen children, just want to get out of the well and play.
Deborah. Earth name: Mother
with slippery walls your spirit can’t find a grip to.

Little girls hear whispers
and they wonder are their mothers okay
Little girls hear whispers
and tell themselves be quiet and pray.