for the neighbors to watch.
The most enduring memory
is smell.
Not a pairing
or a correlative
but a trigger.
The soul of every home has one
that hints at its secrets—
soured milk,
diesel exhaust,
generic Windex,
Stripples,
Phisohex,
Dep hair gel,
drug store gardenia,
Old Spice,
cum soaked Kleenex,
Comet cleanser,
vinegar in her pink bathroom.
I’ve read that dogs can smell fear,
even the ones not housebroken,
beaten because they weren’t taught.
Smell is the only sense
that requires an actual piece,
a sacrifice, a dismemberment,
to be recognized.
To remain intact
is to be scentless,
whole, complete,
original,
but undetectable.
Welch’s at Eucharist,
Net Hairspray, a soft dollar bill,
and flat Shasta orange soda
disintegrated up my nose
into long-term storage.
She’s 84 now.
Rotting garden vegetables,
Pomeranian pee
and moldy bird seed aromas
add to a long finish,
accented with metallic security door
with undertones of rust.
The yapping matted pack serves as her doorbell.
I breathe through my mouth.
Again.
Pubes
The orderly raked the adhesive
glove over the part he’d finished
shaving,
ripping the loose hairs up
with a Velcro sound.
“Ouch!” my mom said.
“The last time I was shaved
down there
I had your brother!”
Oh god,
they used to make family
members wait outside
the curtain
while they did this kind
of procedure.
“Well, maybe,”
I said,
“You’ll come back from the OR
with a baby.”
“Oh, no!” she said.
“You were too mean to your brother.
I never wanted another kid.”
Maybe the 27 Filipinos
who waited with me in
the family waiting area
will adopt me.
I couldn’t understand
a word they said,
but they seemed to like
my hair.
“I was bald and naked
when I came into this world,”
she said.
“And I’ll go out that way.”
The short orderly with stubby fingers
looked nervous.
The hospital smell overshadowed her
gardena cologne.
The green curtain
hanging by silver chains
was pulled half way around.
Her maroon outfit with accessories
was ziplocked
in a clear bag
on the floor.
An accordioned straw wrapper
was wedged under a black wheel
of her bed.
The orderly left.
“You’re not going to die,”
I said.
The blood pressure monitor
beeped
192 in a red square
flashed over 98.
“I’m going to have a stroke
in there,” she said.
A nurse turned off the
sound.
“You’re going to be fine,”
I said.
“It’s been fun
being crazy,” she said.
“I laughed a lot.
I enjoyed myself immensely.”
She smiles.
She likes that she’s stumped me.
“Want more ice?”
I said.
I feed her a spoonful.
The doctor explains
they’re going to snake a tube up
through her groin
into her heart
and shoot it full of a contrasting dye
and take pictures.
“I’ll smile
for the camera,” she said.
When the dye is injected
she mistakes the pain in her jaw
for a stroke.
They give her morphine
to calm her.
It stays in her system
all the way home.
In the car we pass
a strip mall
with the laundromat where I was dropped off
as a kid
every Sunday
to do the family laundry.
Until the day a flasher ripped off his shorts
and beat off
while I folded
my underwear.
“Know what my greatest regret is?”
She asks staring at the line of businesses.
“No, what?” I ask.
“Not buying the sterling silver flatware
I saw in that coin store
next to that laundry place.”
“Oh,” I say.
“What’s your biggest?” she asks.
The green curtain.
Beep Beep
Her eighty-four-year-old hand taps open and closed
as if she were doing the chicken part of an Oktoberfest song.
I frown and shake my head.
I am sure she’s never been to an Oktoberfest,
ever.
She sits on a black stool
perched inside a plexiglass rectangle.
The tech raises her hand high in the air
and brings it down fast.
“…and exhale,” she says.
Her round cheeks collapse as she demonstrates.
With one hand on the tube she is blowing into,
my mom keeps beeping her thumb and fingers at me.
She’s hyperventilating,
the pulmonary test is repeated again,
and once more.
Those green eyes want something.
She doesn’t drink or dance
so I’m certain it’s not “Chirp, chirp, chirp.”
The pulmonary tech gives her an inhaler
and my mom sucks the fluid
in one labored breath at a time
“Then we’ll repeat the test,” the tech says
and closes the clear chamber door.
My mom points to my purse with her tapping hand.
A picture,
she fucking wants me to take her picture.
I take her picture—
sucking on the tube
inside the clear chamber.
Zeitgeist
I don’t have a card.
I sit in the sweet smelling lobby.
Country music plays
with ballads of loss and shame.
Dispensary music;
he’s getting me chocolate.
The place is packed.
He did time twice
for what is legal now.
There should be a word for that,
having pa
id severe consequences
for something that is now
every day normal,
ubiquitous,
legal.
Such as:
single women in bars,
same sex love,
interracial marriage and children.
marrying into a different religion,
not believing in God,
women in the military.
What prices are people paying today
for things that will be no big deal tomorrow?
We won’t give them compensation
or say we as a culture were wrong.
We won’t even have a word for this
short-sighted trauma.
Dead
It was the second “Celebration of Life,”
that euphemism of denial,
in three months.
The patriarch, following his wife of 65 years,
died of a broken heart.
All six kids and seven of the eight grandkids were there.
The eighth was still doing time for attempted murder.
“Can I help?” she asked.
Maybe no one heard. Their backs were to her
as the oldest rushed to get the food out.
The men kept hitting their heads on the long plexiglass vent
over the stove. Empty serving dishes with blue sticky notes
were arranged on the buffet table.
The sickening smell of steak and shrimp made my stomach turn.
Death and more death. Ingesting death to mourn death.
It would be the death of her.
The photo montage flipped through 87 years of pictures
on the sixty-inch TV, along with dead parents
there was a smattering of dead spouses
from 110 Kodak cartridges.
The dead are never dead
until the living stop using them as weapons.
Tides of Death
He picked 100 of his mother’s favorite songs
for the memorial cruise.
His mother asked for a send-off
like the one he threw
for his wife.
Ashes to ashes,
float for a moment
then join the bed of sailors,
the conquered
and the mutineers.
Those who drowned
in the place
we came from.
Those who didn’t make it
home to land.
The request of her son
was for bottomless mimosas
on the ocean,
but an open bar
would be a mistake
this tour.
The Hornblower will float the living
high above the waves.
Last weekend those waves
washed over my lap
soaking the gunnel
of my outrigger canoe,
I bailed
with a cut-off bleach bottle
to get my team
back in the race.
The hulied canoe behind us
left paddles and PFD’s
scattered over the waves.
Bananas are forbidden
because they float
as a watery grave stones
after a canoe and its paddlers
sank.
The cold waves douse
our race momentum,
weighing down the boat.
I bail out scoops
of cold-water death,
rocking back-and-forth in time
with the other five paddlers.
Something of a mermaid siren
calls
us back to the sea floor.
Bring enough cash
for my bottomless mimosas.
Back
“I can’t keep my Life Alert in my bra,”
my mother says,
to the checker at Michael’s.
“It’s too hot. I sweat.”
I pay cash for the plastic packet
of 30 tiny key rings.
“I just wear a muumuu in the afternoons,”
she says
over the cashier
she can’t hear.
I zip my wallet
and take her elbow.
“Let’s go over here,”
I say,
and hook her Life Alert
to a black lanyard.
I slip it over
her starched hair.
Fallen three times
back collapsing down on itself
one crushed vertebra
into another
no feeling in her feet
one swollen leg
her home
an obstacle-course
Pomeranian potty pads
crumpled magazines
outdated papers
she shoves aside
with her three-pronged cane.
“Your doctor says…,” I start
but it’s no use,
she’s talking again.
A light flashes
from one side of her chest.
“I have to turn it towards me,”
she says and digs on the side that had the cancer,
“or I have a blinking headlight.”
She picks up the torn-open package.
“I’ll put the rest of the rings
in my tool box,
for later.”
Twenty-nine left-over rings
saved with her other treasures.
It wasn’t a straw
that broke the camel’s back.
Seen
For fifty-eight years
she’s only seen
who I should have been.
My hair should be cut short
in a black pixie.
My job should be a nurse.
I should be in church on Saturdays.
I should be praying before meals.
I should be jewelry free.
I should be 2” shorter,
and hate cats.
She hated everything about me.
I live in sin,
a fornicator.
I am a drunk
with seven glasses of wine a week.
But last month
Now she’s asking about my work,
my relationships,
my hobbies,
even about my feelings.
She even remembers
what I tell her.
“I didn’t know you took a writing class.”
“You must know about a lot of things
to see all of those kinds of patients.”
“You’re so strong to race canoes.”
“You look so happy.”
“You and Mike really support each other.”
Maybe she in there all along,
hiding her mother’s love from me
until they fixed her loving place.
Heart Repair
Her palm humps the back
of her other hand.
The last time I was at a pre-admit,
I was having a child
of my own.
The flimsy dividers open the cubicles
to a common walkway.
Down the gauntlet
I hear
one HIPPA breach
after another.
A stray strip
of shredded patient info
is we
dged under the signature pad,
connected to the monitor
up on the wall.
There’s still a smudge of ink
I missed
when her frustrated hand
tried to sign
with a real pen.
“What?”
My mom looks at me.
“Crowns,”
I point to my teeth.
She turns back
to the woman across the desk.
“Oh yes. Gold. See?
They’re going to take them out
for my daughter
before they cremate me.”
I look down
and shuffle through the pile of paperwork
on my lap.
“Any urinary tract infections?”
“What?”
My mom turns toward me.
“UTIs?”
I shout.
“Oh,” she replies.
“Not since I became a widow.”
Bee Hive Hair laughs a short snort,
not sure if it’s okay.
Of course, heart surgery
is no laughing matter.
Mom braces herself
to stand and sign her name
again.
Epoch stretches of census data
have passed
while we’ve been estranged.
Now we’re here
at hospital admissions
sludging through
intakes and legal disclaimers.
Bee Hive leaves
to make a copy of Mom’s insurance card.
My mom pats my hand
with her 85-year-old withered one.
“We’re getting to know each other,”
she says,
“and I think,”
her eyes sparkle behind wrinkled lids,
“I think,
we like each other.”
The End
Contents
Proverbs 29:159
Home10
Safe 14
Fishhook 18
Bebe22
Black and White and Read All Over24
Friday Evening Vespers30
Currency Exchange Rate32
Parking Ticket35
His Own Cartoon Book37
Dip38
Rearview Mirror40
Tape Recorder44
Scars47
Radio Frequency48
Darwin Rolls His Eyes50
Crystal Pier51
Lies52
Drum Beat 53
Other People’s Neighbors 54
Leaving56
L’Chaim57
Dulcinea58
Shacking Up or Two Stacks61
Photo66
Cliffhanger68
Halloween72
Tin Heart73
Preening76
Slab City78
Never Brought It Up80
Trick or Treat82