December 2018
I’ve been writing a daily poem for more than seven years. Many mornings, I find myself writing poems about my difficulty with writing poems and saying something new, one of my many obsessions. My poems are often an intersection of my history and today’s events. I hope to arrive at an unexpected insight.
My Mother Returns
A crow, she flits from beech to scarlet oak
repeating her high pitched critiques.
Your hair is your crowning glory.
Wear something more flattering. You
dress like an old lady and eat too much.
She reappears as a tomato, hiding
oozing rot where it meets the counter.
What is that smell? You clean with a lick
and a promise. Move those papers.
Use a wet cloth for the corners.
Mother comes back on the scent of bleach,
the jiggle of the pressure cooker’s valve.
You’re doing it the hard way. Try this.
She demonstrates how to smack the garlic
clove with the flat blade of my largest knife.
Dead thirty years, but she won’t stay buried.
The song is ended, but the melody lingers on.*
*last line by Irving Berlin
© 2018 Joan Mazza
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