the big talk
Oh hold up I want a shot of you here in front of the fig trees holding the bucket though
you never helped harvest them even when I begged and called you lazy and the evening
was pink and breezy
and let’s get one of us here on the porch where we never sat and had a real
heart to heart about the kind of stuff it was my job to tell you
like how babies are made — through gripping trial and error or the sloppiest
accident and that your first kiss will be the worst and best, and how much I worry
that you’ll never be able to live on your own
or that you will live on your own, too much on your own, in someone’s cold
basement apartment that doesn’t meet code from which you call in sick
to work again and curl around your own fleecy sense of purposelessness
and not answer my calls
from the porch where we never watched the goldfinches balance
on the dried brittle heads of coneflower and you never came to understand
that this is why I let the garden get so ugly (it’s ugly so the goldfinches
can eat and sway and glow atop the dead)
or maybe a selfie of us helmeted on the bikes we rode together actually
maybe only once with you asking how much farther how much farther but
all I want is a memory of us stopping for ice cream which I in fact
never let us do and at some point mint chocolate chip dripped
onto your shorts and maybe your chain slipped off and maybe I —
I bent down and showed you how to fix it like a good mom
the cutting edge (mammogram, July 2025)
The tech explains
that this is a new machine
this is a machine made
for boobs like mine
boobs that are dense and hard
to read. The AI will scan the image
before the radiologist does so it’s
“basically like two doctors looking at them.”
And that is the kind of 1:1 ratio my girls deserve.
Before the machine does its business, I sit
on the exam table in a flimsy
pink gown, underwear, and gym socks.
We play a game, not unlike Mad Libs
in which the tech asks
something like “Mother?”
and I wait for a moment
then respond like “Lung cancer. Dead.”
“Father?”
“Melanoma. Dead.”
“Maternal aunts, uncles?”
“Two. Glioblastoma. ALS. Both dead.”
This goes on and on, until we’ve
chronicled every dead or soon dead
branch on the tree, every risk factor.
Across the room, and then in its chilled
embrace, the robot won’t meet
my eyes, won’t even wait
for the radiologist to get
a good look, but leans
hard on the side of me
going home in knots.
when I say I miss the ocean
Eleven thousand nine hundred sixty-two
feet deep, on average, and at least that many
times I have bent at the waist
or squatted down to retrieve a stray,
blurted fuck
as one wedged into the ball of my foot
heard the something-very-wrong clang
of hard plastic bricks trapped in the tornado
of the harder plastic vacuum chamber.
I have threatened donation
to the Salvation Army,
found a decapitated minifig
in the washing machine, in the car,
inside my running shoes, wedged
under the edge of every carpet.
Seconds I have squinted in the August sun
at Legoland, begged you to take a break
from this obsession and run around
a little, whined that there’s not even space
to sit on the floor and build with you
if I were that kind of mom
not who tallies her burdens but
who misses things before they’re gone —
what a therapist might call Anticipatory Nostalgia
for the tschh tschh tschh of your churning
that only now reminds me of the Atlantic
aching for the mess of her depths
when she finally crawls, empty-handed
to the clean sand.
the healer
On a grey afternoon
he crayons a rainbow
the arc crumpled to a jigsaw
bright
misshapen tumors huddling
into one prismatic army
against maybe
some fevered wind
or spilling sea.
I am too tired
to imagine
this rain ever stopping
I want
to curl up with my creases
while the windows bead up
with sweat
while the markers strewn
capless on the table
dry out.
A tower of black
rises from the mass of color
on his page
but before I can ask —
It’s a love machine, he lullabies
tucks me in
to a pretend nap, propping
the paper against a Lego tower
so it faces me in the bed
It will shoot love at you
while you’re sleeping.
