My Mother Asks Me to Write Her a Poem About the Sky for Mother’s Day

She wants to brag to her new assisted-living friend. She, who loves me big as the sky, who tells me look up when I’m in need of a prayer. She can’t know I’m lost and starless in Delhi. There's a cow at every turn, & in a hut in a hand in the film I watch at the national museum. A girl knocks on the car window. Could I learn to carry bricks on my head? A bushel of hay? Crossing off each day until we leave, I eat sugar crystals & fennel seeds, swim laps in a collegiate pool built for no team—chlorine, my tedious reprieve. I believe the world is smaller than it is. I’m not better than the beggar. My mother can’t hear this city chanting its mix of hymns, me reeling at the fringe. I’m grazing the blessed blue meadow of home in my mind, Mom, picking an iris for you.

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Christine Jones is author of the full-length poetry book, Girl Without a Shirt (Finishing Line Press, 2020). She’s also founder/editor-in-chief of Poems2go, a public poetry project, and an associate editor of Lily Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and online, including 32 poems, Sugar House Review, Blue Mountain Review, Ruminate, Mom Egg Review, cagibi, Literary Mama, and Salamander, as well as broadcasted on WOMR’s Poet’s Corner, and WCAI”s Poetry Sunday.