Poetry

Not Alzheimer’s, just dementia unspecified, / said the neurologist

before he understood / one cannot be certain / where something is

No announcement of you / all those decades ago

So out of the sticks and bones and ash / of my untended memory / the tiny chicks / bud again

I birthed my mama / A wild thrashing muscular thing

My daughter’s chubby starfish hands / stretch for the dark-mirrored river

My daughter listens to the canticle / of crickets

On Mother’s Day / you are 21

I’d set my timer for twenty-six minutes / fifteen seconds and write

You might break anywhere.

Sometimes my son looks at me / the way an animal would—