Intersection
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There’s a traffic jam in the front yard: red and limp azaleas, in silent litany, cluster for water.
Magnolia blossoms wither, yellow. Shrieking crickets scuttle behind a battered mailbox. As summer persists, everything exaggerates.
Light splits darkened corners, lines the wooden floor. Selfish and unashamed, I am jealous of your better daughter.
Even in August, when I’d expect winter to hide beneath the ground, you look cold, trembling and glittering like some weak thing of God.
I spoon you diminished bites. Smaller, you say.
Your stiff fingers, like matchsticks, scatter across the sheet.
Though your body is a battleship upon which night advances, could you pity me, Mother, cornered and nicked as a doorstop? [End Page 1002]
Natalie Graham, a Cave Canem Fellow, received the MFA in creative writing from the University of Florida. Currently she is a University Distinguished Fellow in the American studies doctoral program at Michigan State University. She is also completing her first volume of poems, The Perfect Body. She has published poems in Valley Voices: A Literary Review and New England Review.
