Too early, the phone. I pick up,
listen through fog. Bare light
pries me open: I cannot
go to her. I rise from sheets
wrinkled and damp as insect wings,
larval thoughts, sluggish memory:
my mother when I was six, looking
for corn in fields gone dead
after brutal drought,
finding none, not even a blade
of Whitman’s revered grass.
Our lives, mere spit-spattered
stones drying in the sun. Did she
sink into the dust? Did she pull
me into her lap? Maybe I kissed
her, but I think she let me lick
the sweat from her face. That
thirst and sustenance. How does
anyone survive alone?
When I saw her last, home
is what she wanted most,
knowing where the knives are,
how a single piece of toast could
be cut to feed us all. Some would
call that cleaving, which works
both ways: to cut apart,
and to cling with all your heart.
At last, I put down the phone.
Anne-Marie Oomen wrote Lake Michigan Mermaid with Linda Nemec Foster (Michigan Notable Book, 2019), Love, Sex and 4-H (Next Generation Indie Award for Memoir), Pulling Down the Barn (Michigan Notable Book); and Uncoded Woman (poetry), among others. She edited ELEMENTAL: A Collection of Michigan Nonfiction (also a Michigan Notable Book). She teaches at Solstice MFA at Pine Manor College (MA), Interlochen’s College of Creative Arts (MI), and conferences throughout the country.