“A six day drunk,” pep calls it,
“back when showings were a week.”
“At least!” mem nods, remembering
rocking her brother’s death crib –
she was five and he a perfect baby doll.
“A six day drunk,” he carries on,
“Out of town uncles passed out
on the floor. Not anymore,
a two hour wake if you’re lucky,
plus the service, of course. Bing bang boom,
you’re in the ground by noon.” In truth,
we get four hours with mum’s body,
stagnant in the sitting room she spent
her best years banished from: mem
was one to keep the plastic on
the furniture and the children off.
A decade and a little while later,
mum raised us right there, jumping
with us on couches, spilling Pepsi
and making it a living room.
Today her lips are morphine-black,
her face the smoke-stained ceiling’s
yellow-gray. Her hair grew back
a summer storm – white lightning strikes
in ominous swirling clouds –
now a nest of matted gray-brown worms.
Dad touches her head, her cheek, her leg.
He tickles her foot. She doesn’t shout
“Cut it out Benny” like she should.
He doesn’t crack that puckish gap-toothed grin
where he always looks fourteen again,
teasing the skinny straight-haired girl
in the plastic glasses with pink rims
who owned every single color Converse Allstar.
Instead, mem asks the questions
she has to ask to make time move again.
No, mum hated roses. Noone knows
the married name of cousin so and so.
We haggle with the detail merchants
and lose our shirts. Before we’re ready
two men come and take mum’s body
and the room is not any more alive
for the sudden absence of death.
note: this is one of a series of poems in a chapbook I’m working on entitled “yellows”. to read them in their intended order, start here.