I have no other name for her
but Mother, this stranger before me
slumped in her wheelchair
white hair frowsy around her head.
My mother ran for the bus late to work,
scrubbed the kitchen floor on her knees.
Her hand now curled into an unusable gnarl
once brushed dark strands of hair
from her forehead,
turned chicken frying in the pan,
hung sheets and shirts on the line to dry,
tries to raise the spoon toward her mouth,
food falling onto the napkin
tucked into the neck of her gown.
That misshapen hand
wrote columns of meticulous numbers
in accounting books,
its nimble fingers struck chords of hymns
discordant now in this dissonant coda.
She dabbed my street-scraped knees
with iodine as I winced with the sting
and sent me out to play.
We sat on the stairs
as she combed my tangled hair,
telling me to hold still
while she braided my pigtails
and wound rubberbands
around the ends
as memory struggles to plait
one mother with the other.
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