Dear Mother VI
Five years tomorrow.
At noon I strolled past a lantern fly.
I didn’t kill it. You might not know
about the lantern flies.
Dear Mother,
all summer New Yorkers
have had it in for them,
killing with too much enthusiasm.
I shudder at our glee:
giddy at the license granted us
by the authorities, some say,
at the behest of the wine industry.
I’ve seen them crushed
by platform heels, by rolled up magazines.
heard squeals like the ones
old ladies give muggers in the movies.
Sometimes they’re killed by bare,
raw palms. That’s what the child
named for you did last week,
following his brother’s instruction.
It worried me.
I couldn’t bring myself to kill them.
Because they were beautiful,
that shock of red lipstick smear.
It’s not that beautiful things must live.
But they look like the butterflies children draw,
& if we’re killing even beautiful things
what chance is there?
Dear Mother, tonight I’m thinking
of different travelers.
I was thirteen when the cicadas came:
underground since before I was born.
I wanted to squash them too:
They hissed like a four-year-old on a violin.
And how ungraspable
that number: seventeen.
The cicadas must have returned
when I was thirty, that year I first knew
time had come for me &
would never stop coming.
I don’t remember their return.
You would have remembered
like you remembered birthdays.
You would have wished them well.
Last year, back home, you gone,
I woke to their call.
I would have spent hours smashing them,
anything to stifle those shrieks.
A day to them like a year to us,
we tell ourselves, toying
with the fate of smaller beings
What, really, have we taken that wasn’t ours?
* * * * *
For the Tired Ones
How do you feel? At eight, good girl,
I answer truthfully: tired.
That’s not a feeling, the teacher said.
Not an emotion at all. It’s just your body.
Pain is just a feeling the doula says.
Mere sensation. Suffering is a choice.
I believed her: counted
backwards from nine, like a kid
launching plastic rockets.
You must sleep on a strict schedule,
the book says. As strict as your baby,
If your friends do not understand,
get different friends. I got a different
book. Got new coffee mugs, got
a shelf of pill bottles.
No more drugs for fucking,
no more drugs for dancing.
Just one to get you up,
one to put you down.
The cheat to hang the moon.
I notice the moon only
in the mornings, when it wanes.
But sometimes, in hollowed-out hours,
I blast a light; turn on Thelma and Louise.
Geena Davis, big dimple grin, leaning back,
gazing at truck wheels in the morning sun.
I feel awake, she said.
You know?
Desert shade,
giant sunglasses, lipstick bandana
hurling her on her way.
I don’t ever remember feeling this awake.