I’m a child, I swing open a door—my mother
lies naked on top of a man. Have I ever
really forgiven her? It’s May now, spawning season.
Horseshoe crabs—their helmet shapes,
tail-like telsons—have left runic scrawls
in the sand. Dizzy loops, crisscrossed lines,
hollows and half-hollows ploughed out
by bodies, and bodies on top of bodies,
their O’s. While I slept, and left my body
behind, it was another wild little night
on the marsh beach, no patch of sand
unloved, unwritten. Tomorrow, my mother
comes home from the hospital again.
Like Basho’s bee staggering out of the peony,
the future is already the past. In case she can’t
climb the four stairs to my door, I’ve rented
a ramp. She’ll want a shower, I think.
She’ll lean heavily on me as I
ease her into the plastic chair. I’ll lather
her stooped shoulders, her hair.
Help her stand to soap herself. I’ll
towel her off, bear her weight again
as she struggles over the shower’s lip
onto the thick white rug—she’ll be
so happy to be here—her feet
will leave no slippery trail.
—Jennifer Stewart Miller
Jennifer Stewart Miller (Website) is the author of Thief (2021), winner of the 2020 Grayson Books Poetry Prize, as well as The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020) and A Fox Appears: The Biography of a Boy in Haiku (2015). Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology and appeared in RHINO, SWWIM Every Day, Tar River Poetry, The Night Heron Barks, Salamander, and elsewhere.