AI Poetry Prompt: Confessional Free Verse

The Kitchen Table, 1987 Mother's cigarette burned down to ash between her fingers, forgotten while she stared at the bills spread across our yellow Formica table like tarot cards predicting doom. I was eight, eating cereal that had gone soggy in the bowl, watching her mouth move in silent calculations, her lips forming numbers that never added up to enough. The refrigerator hummed its broken song, the one that meant the compressor was dying, the one that meant we'd be eating from cans soon, heating soup on the stove because the microwave was already gone, sold to cover last month's rent. She looked at me then, her eyes the color of storm clouds, and I saw myself reflected there— a small, unwanted expense, another mouth that needed feeding, another body that needed clothes. "Finish your breakfast," she said, but her voice was hollow, echoing from some deep place where mothers keep their guilt and children learn to swallow their hunger without complaint. Twenty-seven years later, I still can't eat cereal without tasting that kitchen, that yellow table, that silence that taught me love was conditional and I was always coming up short. The cigarette finally fell, burning a small hole in the unpaid electric bill, and neither of us moved to put it out.

Inventory This scar above my left eyebrow where Tommy Richardson's ring opened me up in seventh grade— a kiss from a boy who didn't know how to love without leaving marks. My hands, still bitten raw at thirty-five, nails chewed to the quick when anxiety rises like bile in my throat, when the world gets too loud and my mouth forgets how to speak but my teeth remember their first language of self-harm. The stretch marks across my hips from growing too fast, too soon, silver lightning strikes that map the summer I discovered my body was not my own, when uncles started looking longer, harder, when I learned to hunch my shoulders, hide the evidence of becoming. My left breast, smaller than the right, a asymmetry that made me cry in dressing rooms, made me stuff socks in my bra until college, when Sarah traced the difference with her tongue and called it beautiful, called it perfect, called it mine. The cesarean scar, horizontal smile across my lower belly where they pulled you out blue and silent, where you died before you lived, where my body failed its most basic function and left me hollow, a broken vessel that couldn't hold what it was made to hold. My feet, wide and flat, the feet of working women, of standing eight hours behind cash registers, of walking miles because the car wouldn't start, of running from men who thought no meant maybe, meant try harder. This temple, this prison, this history written in flesh— every cell holds a memory, every nerve remembers the hands that hurt, the hands that healed, the way love feels when it finally finds you willing to be found.

Letter to My Father's Ghost You always smelled like Marlboro Lights and disappointment, like the machine shop grease that lived under your fingernails no matter how hard you scrubbed. I remember how you'd come home at six-thirty every night, hang your lunch pail on the hook by the kitchen door, kiss Mom with lips that tasted like coffee gone cold and dreams deferred. You taught me to throw a fastball in the backyard, your big hands covering mine on the seam, showing me how to snap my wrist, follow through, aim for the strike zone you painted on the garage door with leftover house paint. "Keep your eye on the target," you said. "Don't throw what you can't control." But you never followed your own advice, did you, Dad? You threw punch after punch at the kitchen wall when the bills came due, threw your wedding ring across the bedroom the night Mom found your other woman's lipstick on your collar. You threw me too, across the living room when I was sixteen and stupid enough to call you a hypocrite for preaching about integrity while you fucked your secretary in the Motel 6 on Route 9. My shoulder hit the coffee table, the one Mom's mother left her, the one with the glass top that spider-webbed when I landed, cutting my back in thin red lines that match the ones you carved into my trust. I wanted to tell you before the cancer ate your voice, before the morphine made you soft and small and sorry, that I forgave you. But that would have been a lie. What I want to tell you now, six years too late, is that I understand. I understand the weight of providing for a family you never wanted, the slow suffocation of a marriage that died sometime in the Reagan years, the way a man can feel trapped in his own life, desperate for something, anything, that feels like freedom. I understand because I am becoming you, Dad. I see it in the mirror— your weak chin, your angry eyes, your hands that know how to hurt the people who love you most. I taste it in the whiskey I drink alone after midnight, feel it in the rage that rises when my son looks at me with your face, your stubborn mouth, your gift for disappointment. So here's what I couldn't say when you were dying: I hate you. I love you. I am you. I will not be you. Watch me break the cycle, old man. Watch me choose different.