The Horse In The Wall

I look at the wall
and hear her guff,
her rump mashed
in between the drywall
in an entirely new language,
though I recognize it now as
the language of my mother’s
ghost. The pictures move,
the candles tremble as she
turns around in that stall, that
horrible little cell in the wall.
She shifts, trapped,
standing in there so still
she’s growing white
flowers on her back, moss
upon her jaws. There is
fungus puffing from her pointed ears,
her nostrils, her genitals. So when we
open up the wall,
tear into it with an ax or a sledgehammer,
we’ll just find a standing garden there,
an upright beast of foliage, scents,
fruit, roots, her organs turned to
tubers, hair turned into grass, insect
larvae crawling from beneath her skin, and her eyes
the moon.