Author's Note: The mother portrayed in "Snout" is certainly not my mother.  The mother portrayed in "The Cost of Bread" might have been. 

Snout


Get your nose outta what you eat.
We’re not pigs at the trough,
God forbid, my mother said.
Though she was also heard to say,
If you’re gonna eat pork,
it might as well run
from the corners of your mouth.
 
Good advice that turned out,
but how could I know it then?
She wasn’t the kind
to let anything run
where she didn’t intend— 
especially not me
who popped out a mistake,
and kept sticking his nose
in all those places,
she’d always insist, 
it didn’t belong. 





The Cost of Bread
 

I’d come home from school some days
to find Harold Dugan from the bakery truck
taking a spin on my mother’s old calculator.
Or for all I knew on my mother— 
an old rumor that hardly matters now.  
But she sure knew how to make his numbers work
as they spun out on those rolls of tape
and, times being tough, how to defray the cost of bread.
And he was a smooth talker, that Harold,
and school wasn’t done till three
and he owned his route
and he made his own time.
 
My mother kept books her whole life— 
in her head and with a careful hand— 
but now the numbers spin all over the page
and she can’t pin them down.
When the doctor asks her to draw a clock,
it looks like a scrambled egg,
the numbers floating in and out of the shell.
Draw three o’clock, the doctor orders,
and she says it’s too early for lunch.
I tell her, Ma, we already ate
and my mother informs me—and for my own good--
she can eat any time she damn well pleases.
 
(first appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily)