The Metamorphosis

 
As we stand arms akimbo, my hair burns white in the sun.
 
My father is mixing sulpheric acid on the asphalt driveway to see what will melt.
 
The cats circle, my mother sings and cries at a window. It rains and stops.
 
We sit in the mud. Chunks of the driveway flake off, fall down the hill into the creek.
 
The house is tilting west. A doe comes to the backyard, holding one front leg at a right angle.
 
Sometimes, the bark of a live oak tree will turn into a sleeping cat.
 
The tree house is filled with wasps and echoing screams. He painted it orange and blue
just for me.
 
Flour, powdered sugar. Water. This is how I make dinner for the family.

Christine Hamm has a PhD in American Poetics, and recently edited the anthology, "Like a Fat Gold Watch: Meditations on Sylvia Plath and Living". She is currently an MFA poetry student at Columbia University. Christine's poetry has been published in Orbis, Nat Brut, Painted Bride Quarterly, BODY, Poetry Midwest, Rattle, Dark Sky, and many others. In 2017, Ghostbird Press published Christine's fourth book, a linked collection of hybrid poems, Notes on Wolves and Ruin.