by Jennifer A Sutherland

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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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.

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Jennifer A Sutherland is the author of Bullet Points: A Lyric, from River River Books, a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur and Foreword Indies Poetry Book of the Year. Her work has appeared or will soon appear in Birmingham Poetry Review, EPOCH, Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at Hollins University and she lives and works in Baltimore.