Dear Mom—
- Dear Mom—
It's been an hour since the storm sirensbegan, yet I've felt freezing rain for days.
Outside my window, the plastic bagsnagged in the neighbor's tree is filling
with wind then letting it go over & again.I cannot stop breathing. It's been so long
since we've spoken I've given up tryingto remember the last words you slurred.
Your voice a broken shell I cut my earagainst. You & I both know I hope for
no ocean. Now that you're dead, do youthink love is wasted on the living? I have
pretended to look for you in every facesince I left the last room we breathed in
together. Remember when you droppedyour favorite dress at your ankles & stepped
into the street without me? Each nightsome woman stumbled home & tried
to cook your recipes. Her hands just cutyou. I was seven. I promised then I'd never
let her hold me. My life began inside you. Whatelse is there to say? When I listened to a machine [End Page 11]
beep your last heartbeat, I never rested my headagainst her chest. Dear Mom—I'm still waiting
for that horse in my heart to stamp its hoovesagain. I can drop a potted plant from my roof
a hundred times, though it takes only oncefor it to learn to brace against the next impact.
I'm sorry the world made it so hard for youto know the difference between a caress
& a closing fist. I'm sorry you left yourselfalone. Lonely. Briefly, today's rain gathered
on the slats of the deck, & I admired the skytwice. Still I wish I didn't need to see the trees
dark as charred bones, poisoned veins. I'm sorryI made you a disease I wasn't willing to admit
I had for so many years. I close my eyes & tryto summon your face—a hole blown through
the center of every floor in this endless skyscraperinside me. Sometimes, in the mirror,
I stick out my tongue & widen my eyes & crylike a baby who needs her mother to see her
need, to be her initial witness, to prove sheexists, so she can stop hauling her body
from city to city, bed to bed, searchingfor herself in the faces of strangers. When [End Page 12]
the temperature finally dropped, the rainfroze a mosaic, angry fragmented second
sky the snow is working hard to cover now.The sun never showed today. Still I feel her
setting. As a girl, I'd sit by the shore & studyher early bruise & her evening blood spilling
under a door to another room of the universe,as if I knew every gray day to come without her. [End Page 13]
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of Errata (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award, and In the Carnival of Breathing (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. She is an Assistant Professor of Poetry in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
