Hold out your hands, my mother says
in the dim-lit box of our bathroom,

windowless, the wallpaper a thicket
of coiled vines, roses

flattened in bloom, buds
stunted. It’s night. The tile’s cold

as chemical burn. She wants to guide
her stainless-steel tweezers

to my knuckle, to the lip
of another wart. We’ve done this

before: I’ve bitten the chapped inside
of my cheek as she yanked, scraped

without rage, her grip
calm on the flaw, exacting

the fix, while the sink’s basin
dribbled with color. But the roots

only deepened, sprouted back,
burrowed down closer to the vein

to defy her, I want to say, though she
was beyond ordinary resistance

or pain—in the bathroom lamplight
her shadow covers my waiting face.

Hold out your hands, she says.