First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Hero

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I'm still searching for the ones who believe living feels like fire,
Too busy saving the world to fold laundry
A fucking hero complex that carried us far enough into this mess to get through it,
Or so I tell myself.

But I only see ghosts in dreams, and I forgot to ask them
If they would also like to join our congregational dinners,
Instead of just our prayer circles
To save my mother’s life.
So I haunt their cemeteries reading poetry I wrote, and letters that my mother wrote them.

Dear G-d,
A friend asked me yesterday how you like your coffee, when you and I hang out like this.
I never thought to ask.

Because everyone is put together until the moment that they aren’t.
So I pray, and burn the eggs, and wonder why everything I do is a public affair
For just a little while longer.

Scraping the secrets of the world from rush-hour license plates
Certain I can do better.

And beyond the gorgeous, brutal landscape where I once taught children to fight in the snow
Beyond validation stolen from the static on the radio
I see the world I would have changed for her.

Because I speak with memories as often as those ghosts.
And I can make the license plates say anything I want;
Rewriting our destinies with the unused letters
By the side of the road
Time and again.

Because I still believe that living feels like fire,
So meet me there.

Comments

  1. Beth S MillerJanuary 29, 2023 at 10:54 AM

    Your pain hurts my heart. There are real live, flesh and blood people among your ghosts, including Mom, Dad, your sibs. We're trying to keep you and her focused on life!!

    ReplyDelete

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