Mother’s Day

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, and Fitz,

my upstairs landlord, is fussing with the fence

again in the backyard. I can see him through the uncovered

window he cut into my door. It is cold again

and looking like rain. I remembered to take

my pill again this morning. It could happen that simply:

a memory slips cool and wet through the brain,

an untouchable fish, until straddled

for pleasure on the mattress again, its lip nicks the hook

of a nerve, I think shit, and before we know it a few weeks pass

and some piss on a stick alerts us to our blessing:

an alien angel, swelling from the sugars

it siphons like a parasite, has landed

in the attic above my bladder.

Not everybody tries.

I have been told the surprise

of my arrival was welcome. If a different

switch in the zygote had been flipped, my name

would have been Michael. I dated a Michael.

Almost anyone can infect you with life if you let them.

The lady upstairs caught the bug again quick. It boomeranged

back like the remains of a stomach flu and she passed

her second side-effect out like a cloud of undispersing

gas a few months back. I knew when I heard

it cry: small, muted, confused. Strange

that he’d been up there all that time, nine months and silent

as a tumor in that flesh-bump, now only audible

because unplugged and hungry.

To the hormone-thwarted offspring

of my chemically stoppered ovaries: I don’t have anything

wise to say to you. If you were here, I suppose

we’d make do. Go out for midday walks with our raincoats

on, when it rained. Someone would teach you to catch

fish, build fences. You’d split me like a fissure

to get out here, get out here and scream at the raw end

of every newly erupting need. I know

you’d know no better, but you’d feel like a knob

about your own fuss and rush if you knew

what was in store: day after day cropping up unstoppably,

at times like memories so unwelcome

you’d give anything to make them stop.

There are better things, too.

Like love, and the tender way skin

has of folding over itself while you sleep.

Tomorrow we are going to my parents’ house for dinner.

This year, I have made my mother truffles, a new trick

I’ve acquired in the kitchen. We pressed each brown

indelicate mass into our best attempt at roundness,

clumps melting in our hands more quick than we could roll them.

It’s like a thank you, I guess.

We’ll be heading out at five. If you were here,

you’d really have no choice but to come.