Poetry
I kept them all. The poems, I mean. When I / tried to tell your mother, she’d leaned in…
Two months into her illness, Pat / lay in pain, nearly immobile, / nourished by pills and liquids, / no appetite even for favorite foods—
My mother knows there are three / ways to be clean: to take a mess / that’s there and cover it…
They say the pulses come from a distant galaxy, / an infant cluster in the first moment of birth.
Once a woman who lost her mother / told me the story of a guru rushing / to satisfy his dying mentor’s last wish.
You come back, / bent over my things / like a collector, hunched, / touching, wanting to lay claim / to everything.
perhaps there should be another word for depression / we’ve become too accustomed to the sound