She held a pink can of TAB in her right hand,
bangles on her hairless wrist, a beehive hairdo—
It was her Liz Taylor look. When sad, her eyes
went small like gold purses, clicking shut.
The color Kodak family of smiles
faux as a salesman’s pitch. Our dad took
all the photos, until he didn’t.
One by one, mom met them at “Jewish Singles.”
The femme perfume on her black cocktail dress
would linger until dawn. One night, my sister baby-sat,
we slimed and puckered with mom’s make-up.
We gorged the rouge dark into a widow’s peak.
Eclipsed in the medicine cabinet,
we found the little pink plastic quark of tablets—
one for each day of the month.
I felt the Ten Commandments gasp for air—a goldfish
out of water in my gut. Picturing our mom
on the couch at “Uncle Irv’s,” her legs captured by
his pasty belly. That night I bled for the first time,
discovered the ache of women.
My new flannel pajamas, ruined. Some days,
a black dog lived on a street in my heart—
barked and jabbed at the wire fence
where God stamped a jinx on me.
In a December blizzard,
while we ate popcorn and played hangman, our mom
drove the wicked snowy roads, as her Liz Taylor
eyelashes blinked with the flashers—That disk
of a hole to get to the tome, not made in stone—
but feathers, in her other bed at “Uncle Irv’s.”
