Sometimes, I find even the word hard to hear or say: “mother,”
because it awakens the memory of cancer eating away at my mother.
Hollow doctors telling trite truths without the glaze of the personal —
but terminal, palliative never pierced through the naiveté of my mother.
Bone, lung, the bump she found near her underarm and broke down —
but I never cried. They will fix you, I lied every day to my mother.
When her second lung collapsed, the garbage can became a spacecraft.
She was gone. Left behind was the mania of my medicated mother.
The breathing mask made her lips billow like towels on her laundry line.
Accepting it, and out of fear, I told them Do Not Resuscitate my mother.
We took her off the respirator so she could eat her last burger and shake.
She mumbled, Marry for love. That was my last Monday with my mother.
In death, she could breathe. That aerated me until November, her birthday.
Then, her loss ran through me me like water through paper maché. Mom!
Now movie mothers, no dinner, cigarettes bring me back to that word:
remembrances emitting erratically like radioactive decay. No mother.
Even then, I see the bloated paper woman-doll laying in a coffin, not her.
Jess, old friends’ eyes seem to say, I always thought you hated your mother.
