What Daughters Come Down To

For what I’m sure is the fifth time, my mother

plugs in a flat mournful hum where the words

I love you too should be. Then she hangs up 

without saying goodbye. I squeeze my eyes

shut, try to imagine 82 autumns in the bones,

in her rasping joints, in the cool, jaded thump

of what is still a migrant’s ever-arriving heart.

However, I believe she is required to love me.

I wonder what God was teaching her all those 

years, those day after days coaxing raucous 

hips into deadening girdles and gray A-lines 

so she could lose her damned mind to organ. 

Was it all theater, a screeching of north when 

south was what itched her, all of it mock belly, 

the nails, splinter-spewing cross, some sly

spirit habitually overloading her spine, making

her dance thirsty and unfolded? How could all 

those wry hymns and hot-sauced hallelujahs 

lead to this hum, clipped connect and hush?

I am hundreds of miles away, but I can see

where she is sitting, hand still on the phone.

Every surface in her tiny apartment is scoured 

and bleached, draped in a disinfectant meld 

of rainshower and blades. The kitchen glints. 

Her rugs are faultless. The purpled tulips I 

have sent for her birthday are insistent feral 

beauty, a blood in the room. Like her daughter,

they have bloomed in the clutches of vapor. 

I love you too, she thinks out loud, but can’t.