Banana Cream Pie Had Never Tempted Me to Bury

a spoon into its body.

Bananas were always
utilitarian.

Breakfast,
not dessert.

Shower,
not Jacuzzi.

Dinghy,
not yacht.

A Noom-approved snack,
something immediate
to silence a stomach
’s complaint while walking
out the door

until

banana cream pie became the last food
my father ever ate.

After the chemo
ravaged the nerves
in his palms and fingertips,
I fed him
spoonful by spoonful

in his hospice bed, fighting
the instinct to imitate
sounds of an airplane

or train
or to say, Good job
after each bite.

Now I can’t pass
on the vanilla custard,
caramelized fruit,
yellow no. 5.

I yearn to taste
the last taste
that crossed my father’s lips,

yearn to feed
it to him

again

and again

and again.

Always Her Baby. Always His Mama.

She’s still alive

as a young woman, younger
than I am now, in a black and white photograph⁠—
I don’t know what happened

to it⁠—with my father as a boy, gazing
at her, the immensity of a second-born
son’s love emanating from his eyes, the son who was always more

soft like her. The son who would care
for her fifty years later in her dementia. Shower her.
Clothe her. Ease her into a bed down the hall from his

each night. I can see her:
embroidered handkerchief tucked into a sleeve,
ankles crossed in front of the TV, top foot swaying
to Lawrence Welk on DVD, not understanding

how the performers would sing and dance
and sing and dance and sing and dance
with no commercials, whispering at the end
of each episode as the next would begin,
I don’t understand. I don’t understand.

She died while she slept
in my old room, while I slept
in the room next to hers,

and maybe it was a few days later,
or maybe it was a few weeks, she came
to visit. I think. I felt her there⁠—I think I did⁠—

but I told her,
or my brain,
or the dark,

Grandma, I love you so much,
but you’re scaring me, and I felt her
leave⁠—I think I did⁠—
and she never came back.

I only felt her again when her son was dying
of cancer, when I left his side to walk the dogs,
and an owl flew over my head so closely I felt⁠—but did not hear⁠—

the whoosh of its wings. December. Friday the thirteenth.
The seventeenth anniversary of her death.

They live together now
in the photograph.

She, forever the smiling twenty-something
seated on a bench somewhere I do not know.
He, her four-year-old son, unable to take his eyes off her.

Ever After Alive at Wegmans

A couple hobbles together,
a pair of cobblestones
in a linoleum-lined grocery.

She walks with a cane, picks
a red onion and places it in the basket without
her husband noticing. He uses the cart

handle for support as they shuffle through the produce.
Though he holds no cane, his unkempt beard, as long
and gray as her spine-like braid holds a kind of charm.

They’re choosing gala apples, each of them pointing
out the flaws in the other’s selections⁠—a language
of half sentences, grunts, and gestures⁠—

before they settle on the five winners
to accompany them home. Here they come again,
he, now, with the cane, and she the cart. He leans in

to tell her how beautiful she still is⁠—or maybe
that probiotic yogurt is two-for-one today⁠—
and their matching wide-brim hats makeout

like newly deflowered teenagers. His hand sweeps
the curve of her back, rests there for just a moment,
the way it has⁠—I’m sure⁠—for 40 years,

the way her body⁠—Can’t you just tell?⁠—feels
more like home to his body
than his own ever did.

When Cicadas Emerge from Their Netherworld

After Ada Límon

their exoskeletons split
open like a fault
letting the magma of their adult selves

erupt backwards and upside down
pulsing
wet font becomes six-legged beast clinging

to its old and empty body a desert
now its etiolated wings unfurl like resurrection

ferns after the first gulps of March
rain lymph swelling that gossamer to life

this is how we’ll save each other
from our burning world

ugly
and desperate to breathe climbing

skyward depleted from what we escaped
screaming at the top of our lungs

Collage of Thoughts

folding in
on herself the pleats
pleas for the world to make sense
of her like the map
that guided her grandmother
and her mother⁠—
in her youth⁠—
but is now far out
of date with the swirls of highways
that painted over the pencil
-ed back roads and side streets⁠—
how the map still sleeps, bends
mistaken for other bends
like a lady
‘s fan in a desk drawer

Clothes made of linen dreams
she imagines
what it might feel like to be
a crane with wings waving
goodbye to the menagerie
flapping around her still
grounded in their everyday motions
what it might feel like to have
magnetic fields navigating
her through cotton candy
and berry sherbet skies.