(Hcaeb is a poem in reverse, or in retreat)

From just after sunrise
until the sun crowned at noon,
I stood knee-deep in lakewater,
tearing at the weeds
that clung like guilt
to the shoreline.
I started before the cicadas sang,
before the heat rose off the sand like steam,
before I could talk myself out of it.

I pulled them by the root,
curled, fibrous, knotted like old veins.
Rinsed each one in the shallows,
dragged them to shore,
stacked them neatly
in rows he would see
if he ever looked.

The lake was warm.
The sun was not.
It burned my neck,
peeled my shoulders raw.
I didn’t wear sunscreen.
I wanted the pain.
I thought maybe suffering
was a kind of currency.

My stepfather never asked me to do it.
That’s what made it feel pure.
Or maybe just desperate.
I didn’t want payment.
I wanted his voice to land on me
without anger in it.

Inside,
the couch was devouring my mother.
She lay curled up like a drying leaf,
mumbling a recipe she forgot halfway through.
She didn’t ask where I was.
Didn’t notice I had been gone for hours.
She was forgetting how to care.
He never started.

I kept pulling.
By ten in the morning, my palms had blistered.
By eleven, they had split.
By noon, I was dizzy.
But he still hadn’t come down,
still hadn’t opened the back door,
still hadn’t called out
what are you doing out there,
which would have been enough.

He could have said
that’s pointless,
and it still would have mattered.
Silence is a kind of death
you bury yourself inside.

I remember pausing,
just once,
looking up at the house
and thinking:
if I do this perfectly,
he might ask me
to do something else.

Not thank you.
Not good job.
Just another task.
Another chance.

But when I finally stopped,
sun-stunned and trembling,
the shore looked exactly the same
to anyone not trying
to be loved into existence.

He never stepped outside.
The door never opened.
My mother slept.
And I watched the lake erase
the footprints I had left behind.

Joey Bernert lives in Michigan, where she works in social work and public health. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Orichalcum Tower Press and writes about memory, care, and emotional survival.