Honeymoon

My mother lost one kitten heel
in the gravel parking lot
of a cheap Idaho Falls motel
one snowy night in early May.

My father carried her to the room
like a sack of potatoes, he said,
spilling her onto a bedspread
patterned with daisies.

She had, as a girl, imagined honey,
that there would be honey, its sweetness
dripping, and the moon
like the song⁠—its silvery light.

Zenith, 1969

Once I was a starfish in the hands
of my astonished father
who held me up to the black and white TV to see history in the making.
I was a baby and could not speak,
and all he could say

(not daughter, what will become of us?
what future?
what gravity? how far is far?
will we be lost out here? I’m scared
our home is so, so blue)
was moon.

Feast

Those summers my sisters and I turned our hunger into a contest⁠—
whose ribs stuck out the furthest? Shirts pulled up
to compare our flat-chested cages.

Around noon, we rode our beat-up bikes
fenders rattling, kickstands knocking pedals,
toward the city block of trees where parks and rec fed
all the neighborhood kids
the one meal we’d have that day:
white bread baloney and mustard sandwiches,
a Saran wrapped chocolate chip cookie,
still chilled from the cooler,
little milks if you had a nickel, a red apple,
and sometimes, a stick of cheddar cheese.
If the edges were green we said cheese is mold
and ate it anyway.

At the end of summer when free lunch closed
we foraged in the yard: blueberries
until there were no more blueberries, nectar
sucked from rhododendron trumpets,
sourgrass we chewed into cud.

When we told our father we were hungry he’d smile and say,
Nice to meet you, Hungry! and try to shake our hand.
When our mother found us in the kitchen
making wine from sprouted potatoes and dandelions,
she sighed and went to bed.
I stirred the wine while each of us said one wish:
Macaroni. Peach pie. Pot roast,
then filled our plastic cups.
How quietly we sipped.

Cheryle Jean

“We must build houses for our mothers in our poems.”

Aracelis Girmay

After my mother chewed off the man’s arm
people took sides. The man’s mistake
was that he dropped his smartphone
too close to the cage
while taking stupid pictures
and my mother wasn’t in the mood.

He thought he could do what he wanted,
but she was still in her slippers
and worn-out robe, orange, striped
with the markings of shadows cast through daylight.
Now he has one less arm.
It was the cage, the iron bars
that let him believe she was harmless.

He demands what he wants, no matter
if she’s tired or
that the place is a wreck,
someone shit in the pool again
and she has a toothache
no one will fix, because
who wants to get in the mouth
of an animal who has let herself go?

When the church, social services, the IRS, the police, animal control, and the bank
came to put my mother down, she said
all she’d wanted was a bite
of the rust-colored dirt
outside the cage,
and he’d gotten in her way.

Ghost Elephants

After Jean Valentine

“Vintage wedding dresses”
“Symptoms of priapism”
“Elephant sanctuary in Tennessee”⁠—

these, the most recent Google searches
on my mother’s iPad
she needs me to fix yet again.
Seven years cancer in the bone
so I don’t ask.

Before I leave, I set traps
for the fruit flies.
She thanks me.
Her husband, hands in pockets,
thanks me.

When she’s gone I will remember this,
and also the time
I found a shattered mirror
under her recliner, and
the days after chemo, hallucinating
she was a racecar driver, pacing the room
looking for her keys, and the bucket list
trip to Neskowin after radiation.
She planned to shit in a towel
if she couldn’t make it to a toilet.

All of this
I will never not remember.

When she died, we sent a little money
to that elephant sanctuary
in Tennessee.

Ghost elephants,
Reach down,
Cross her over⁠—