Lee Hodge
30 November 2019
For my mother
For my mother
I’d stepped into the canal of your throat and it was as close
as the down filling the cells of your coat at the airport bar.
Seated and staring at the floating monitor as it played a
looped image of flames engulfing negative space, you spat
out black on the porch of the new neighbors and pocketed
jewelry from the glass counter of the department store.
Bringing home pieces of incomplete sets, you doled them out
businesslike with the same expression you’d had cleaning
the blood off the wall after your father broke your nose.
Later, you leafed through the newspapers
stacked to the curved aluminum ceiling of the trailer
in Arkansas where your mother was dying
and watched her settle for lighting her cigars in secret
against the angry red coil of the electric burner—
the spidery white pins of her fingers bent
in the reflection of the copper tiles occluded with grease.
You settled for that facsimile of fire on the monitor,
holding your lampshade of a cocktail with dignity.
It captured your attention; never gaining
on anything, never touching anything, its image
controlled there, its image fixed; devouring and devouring
all the terrible joy it brought.
as the down filling the cells of your coat at the airport bar.
Seated and staring at the floating monitor as it played a
looped image of flames engulfing negative space, you spat
out black on the porch of the new neighbors and pocketed
jewelry from the glass counter of the department store.
Bringing home pieces of incomplete sets, you doled them out
businesslike with the same expression you’d had cleaning
the blood off the wall after your father broke your nose.
Later, you leafed through the newspapers
stacked to the curved aluminum ceiling of the trailer
in Arkansas where your mother was dying
and watched her settle for lighting her cigars in secret
against the angry red coil of the electric burner—
the spidery white pins of her fingers bent
in the reflection of the copper tiles occluded with grease.
You settled for that facsimile of fire on the monitor,
holding your lampshade of a cocktail with dignity.
It captured your attention; never gaining
on anything, never touching anything, its image
controlled there, its image fixed; devouring and devouring
all the terrible joy it brought.
Lee Hodge is a current doctoral candidate in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University and a bachelor’s degree in writing from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Tulane Review, Euphony, Heartwood, Clinch Mountain Review, After Hours, Funny Looking Dog Quarterly and Mouth. She is a recipient of a 2020 Laura Bassi Scholarship and a 2019 Carol Weinstein grant.
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