Wildness is one of those words that looks like it’s missing a letter. I want another d or n. Something. Maybe a second i or one of those slashes right through the middle that allows the word to be at once one thing and two things. Wild|ness. That still doesn’t look right.

I had a thing to say about poetry, a quip or an aphorism that I came up with while I was making the bed. Then I saw my husband’s blood on a white pillowcase and lost my train of thought. He cut himself working on the house and didn’t think he needed a bandage. He needed a bandage. Because he had no bandage, the pillow became his bandage.

There’s something about the blood-red of blood on the bright white of white that makes the non-brain parts of my body react. To what, I don’t know. I saw a beaten woman bleed all over her white eyelet skirt at substitute teacher training last year in St. George, Utah. But this goes back further than that.

There are also, of course, the white floral handkerchiefs women used to carry that had crimson berries sewn onto them to disguise the blood they were coughing up because they had TB. But that’s not it, either.

It’s something from my childhood, something I saw or experienced. Blood drowning white cloth. White cloth destroyed by blood. Frantically trying to get bloodstains out of white fabric.

My mother knew how to do that. She removed nearly all traces of what happened to her, what she survived. She had a wildness that couldn’t be beaten or shaken or ripped out of her. I mean another word there, not ripped—a word I can’t say here on Facebook. Remove the i and one p. Add an a. Yeah, that word. By my uncle and later by my father.

Wildness is one of those words that looks like it’s missing a letter.

Trauma is one of those words that looks like it’s packed with bodies.

Mother is one of those words that looks like it can be anything at all. Moth. Ether. Mote. Other. Tome. Moot. Mere. Mete. Hoe. Tooth. Hoot. Root. Home.

But most of all: There, there. There, there.

And the blood washes down the drain like always.