​The Red Pocketbook


I want to call my mother to tell her I am wearing 
the red pocketbook that she bought when she
visited me in Maine 
 
then I remember that she is gone; we are divvying up
her cashmere sweaters; most packed up for charity
because they are so small. 
 
I saved her father’s letters with their spidery script  
and pedantic advice; my father’s love letters from
during the war, "How I miss you my sweet angel."


the vowels large and looped.  We threw out
her newspaper clippings.  We get our news from
the internet and it's always bad; 
 
memories are coming in waves now
like the diarrhea that woke me up this morning;
how she said I had no personality; how she
 
let me be eaten by the neighborhood wolves.  
I haven’t forgotten how her world was a dense  
web of enemies, grudges but, in her eulogy,
 
I will speak of how she took me to the library
every week, art classes, museums, not how she
forced me to give up my dreams 
 
for a soul crushing  path that nearly killed me  
because in  the end, there was so much love,
and now I want just one more phone call.    

​**
Published in Cape Rock Magazine April 2019