When my mother drank she cracked
time’s secrets from her blue chair:
gold ignition in the glass, rolled in the mouth
and her body slowed down, her voice
slowed down, her breath
drew the pixels on the screen
to a silver stop. Her swallow warped the drapes.
And I stepped inside
her stalled world:
hunched, my dirty wings furled tight,
hands out to take the leaves
and bones, her emptied plate. I tell you
I was the only thing moving
in the room. I was twelve. My knuckles
braced the chording air. A messenger,
skin bladed by dumb bones, I shook—
worn teeth, worn hush and my mouth
parting in terror’s small slow-motion bloom.
Forty years on, I swing a door into the room
where she sits now with assistance, forgetting
houses and towns, her words turning seasons
to stone. Her bowl steams and the screen
brims with stars. Past her shoulder the glass
frames branches that swim in tulip light.
Against belief, against reason, it’s May.
She looks up and sees me, the only
moving thing. Finds a body
I haven’t been in years: rose tremble,
hard lips and wings, and she calls me
by the name I wore petals ago,
my first ribs listing. Little Bird. Until she sees me
I don’t remember where I’m from.
She tilts her glass. She’s thirsty.
Says, You’ve come all this way.
–
Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of Book of Asters and No Eden, both from Mayapple Press, and Where the Wolf, winner of the Diode Book Prize, forthcoming in 2021. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review Online, and Shenandoah. She teaches writing online for Johns Hopkins CTY.