The call costs five cents a minute and you have to be ready with a form of payment. On the other end of the line there is
A princess stuck in a well
Bears curled in around a wee-sleepy home invader
A girl in a badly blended family with a knack for the most inconvenient footwear
And all the rest of us-
sleeping beauties, garden-of-Gethsemane-tired
Of hearing about
This impending crucifixion.
The day that Miracle died we walked in the mountains. Two bears walked ahead of us and their presence seemed ordained, magical.
It was magical I tell myself even though she died.
Sometimes I feel like I am out of mantras, out of coins for the machine, no longer capable of telling myself to believe it will all be ok.
Then Casey Hathaway tells us all about the bear who kept him company in the woods we have all got lost in and
I go there to find Him too, lean into his ursine chest, sob a little.
Believe He is real, despite the feat in our eyes.
It is a note on my phone, metonymy for bottomless loss, I call her name every day, aware that lost causes are lost causes are lost causes
How will we ever heal?
How will we be whole again?
I would ask the boy on the other side of the over-priced desk
If I had the heart to keep
Picking my battles
The LA Times writes a puff piece on abortion doctors who travel to states like mine to kill the unborn.
Our Eichmanns
Our Holocaust.
Matthew 2:18 NIV
[18] “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”
I call her name
Stalk the neighborhood
Take the dog
Print out sepia copies of
Her sleeping, staring pensively at the lens
Reminding of me the others
All gone missing
You look at wonder every day
For love or pay
I look for love
Every day
See the missing
You.
I tell myself to find her, in the old kitchen where she did so many dishes by hand. It had yellowish linoleum, dark wood, and doors which lead out to the front room and dining room. We sit at the ugly white table with the thin plasticky band of gold around its edge.
I run my finger along its long-gone edges as we drink something warm together.
I tell her she is beautiful, she has always been beautiful, even in those years she could not see it. I tell her I admire her courage and willingness to to be the bad mom. I tell her I have learned from her mistakes.
She would tell me something, surely, what is it?
In a house so full of sturm and drang, I want to hear her voice over the din of the little ones
So long gone.
She sat in a chain restaurant twenty years ago, this time of year, not knowing that she would forget her purse there so close the federal courthouse. Retrieve a purse; retrieve a child. Strange calculus of loss.
The Parable of the lost mother–
Waiting for the baby who does not remember who they once were together
So long ago.
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