(c) 2017
Mother is always crossing the wrong street
is at the wrong corner, is moving the wrong way.
I cross with her, arguing out the steps.
At one point I began to turn the right way
and left her behind, first in guilt, then glee.
Not that I have always been careful.
Once my heel got caught in the sewer grill
and a crowd gathered to jeer.
Right way. Wrong way. Who knows?
The streets are endless and in each passing decade
they lose luster.
(c) 8/7/2021
In Mother’s mind it all has equal value:
the loose, stripped screw, plastic Happy Meal toys,
a pharmaceutical bottle filled with teeth.
But from which of five mouths? All of it
mixed into bins and boxes alongside recipes
she’d never alternated with the TV or instant dinners,
unopened greeting cards and cut out articles
unrelated to any of us.
Like busted shells mixed with the sand and stones
on an ever-spreading shore none of us had visited,
how could anyone find memory in these scraps?
Then here, a decades grown stack of Gift Cards.
Like other sensual experiences she chose to miss or waste,
these are now wallet-sized milestones of the economy,
all these restaurants closed in the last recession, or
the one before it.
The medicine cabinet filled with cologne that has soured,
and makeup, glumpy or dried
that we girls purchased back in junior high.
She wanted but was startled by touch.
In a sock drawer I find the golden apple paperweight
I bought her from my first job’s wages.
It is still in its red velveteen bag
although the different tables have always had stacked
paper.
Nothing I ever offered was accepted or used.
Now she is being moved against her will
from four stories to one room.
She has prepared to dig in,
to fight with the neighbors over noise
and parking, and property lines:
those goddamn bastards
to forget why she drove to the store,
to forget trash day, or to check Sell by Dates,
to turn off the stove top.
For years she has forgotten to clean the litter
and the floorboards need to be replaced.
Mother imagines every trinket, every scrap
will go with her, even the disintegrating shoes
she wore at her wedding seventy years ago.
She refuses to believe we would be callous enough
to send hoard, unwanted, to a landfill.
(c) 8/7/2021
I want to summon your scent the way
I summon a facsimile of your smile.
Those crooked
teeth in your wide mouth
and
you leaning against your first muscle car,
then again as you rise in the
pool
the water mirroring beams.
The mole on your shoulder.
Your impossible phrasing as though you couldn’t decide
what the next word could or should be.
Maybe my name was the only word
I heard
un-stuttered
and precise
because
I needed it heard with tenderness.
But
your scent. I recall it as delicious
nothing
about it dangerous or toxic.
No matter how often I drew it in,
languished in it, it is now lost, un-triggering
unlike the childhood smells of
rain
or freshly mown grass, the lilac
bush next door
and the driveway hot tar poured.
If only I had known you then.
