The Maynard
Spring 2014

When I Call My Mother

When I call my mother she says don’t
worry. She says the doctors have got her,
called while she was out back looking over
her flowers. They are so infatuated
with her brain and she was just sitting there
in the flowers. The doctors, they need tissues
when my mother comes back to see them, tissues
are all they need, she says, they are so fascinated
by her brain. She had taken a stroll down
along the water that creeps closer to her
house, every year a few inches you barely notice
it, she says. She looks out from the kitchen,
her hands covered in Magic
Baking Powder and you would barely notice
anything at all about the water growing
less shy about its appearance in my mother’s
back yard. I want my mother to live
and find someone to spend on her all the golden
years of his life. She’d just like to sit
in the grass and dream sometimes, always
and they may need to put a needle in her brain,
infatuated with the mambo
of little black dots on the X- Ray. I hold my breath
and she says she might have
had a little stroke and didn’t know it. Behemoth,
my mother, she was just out back seeing
about the flowers. Spent all her years a nurse
loving physics until there was physics in her love. Energy
and force. She musters up the courage to dust,
after the call, the molecules on her mother’s
picture. When I call my mother she has spent
all her day cleaning, says she needs a tissue,
and I should come see the ocean,
it's getting so close.