- Lives My Mother Lives Doing Chores
Lifting rocks, my mother, the private detective, catches the killer. The deputy. He’s got another teenage girl. When he flashes his badge like a pardon, she shoots his hand and both measly kneecaps.
Shoveling gutters, my mother, the first female major league baseball player, hits a home run into the stands. Her ball breaks the president’s nose and he cries like a little girl on camera. Refusing to apologize, she riles the country.
Trying to sleep between milkings, my mother the radical punches a priest in the face outside an abortion clinic. She graffitis right-wing churches like boxcars and crashes their services with signs condemning God. She goes to jail happy. [End Page 154]
Michael Walsh’s debut collection, The Dirt Riddles, won the inaugural Miller Williams Prize in Poetry from the University of Arkansas Press and the 2011 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry.