Twilight, and I hear
her voice, familiar
kettle-hiss.
Quiet, girl,
she commands; then
my childhood rooms
are here, each
one dark as pitch,
bulls-eyed, red-
end cigaretted.
In the center
Mother sits,
seething.
Labyrinthine lady
fulcrum : rattle
preening. Tiny
importuning click/
click/click of gas
as she warms
the morning’s
coffee, aluminum
saucepan tap
and pour. Snap
of air trapped inside
her. Cricket clatter.
The house, its grid
of trenches, of gangrene
and defilade,
unacknowledged.
Rainbow-sheen halo
of puff and smoke,
her whisper-drab
devotional,
her pieta. Membrane
contracting, clutching
fibrous wall
and sinew.
Lung, spasming
and black,
immobile,
wheeze and block.
I must
have frailed her,
asked too much
of her thin-stretched
décolletage,
engendered
a reaction.
When she died the
aperture swelled to many times
its anxious size.
