There was a year my mother couldn’t leave her bed.
Something about her nerves.
Then the story about almost being kidnapped.
She turned away from the details as one turns
from a needle sliding through skin to enter a vein.
My grandmother made her cry often, yet we’d return,
on The Canarsie Line, 14 stops into Bushwick,
crowded with people daydreaming as they swayed or lurched,
under the wobbling fans, fat art made from spray cans.
I’d crane my neck as far as I could feel the muggy breeze
against my face, inhaling lithium grease, timing the arrival
out of the darkness into flickering lights.
The last time, because there is always a last,
we rode that train, the doors to the exit were locked.
A group of us pushed through the turnstile into a trap.
My mother grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go.
When she was dying, she said, you know your father
apologized. Then she quickly went back under the wave
of the in-between confusing me with her sister,
forgetting my name, my face until the next time
she came up for air, she said, my mother told me
I deserved it—losing my son.
Tending to a body dying is a secret. An unspoken pact,
never disagree with the dying. Tell others it was peaceful,
without incident. No one wants to hear the body swells;
organs strain for oxygen. No one needs to know you placed
your cheek on her hot skin stretched to almost bursting,
while lamplight broke over her and drank her in.
