When they realize I haven’t come to this table to sit quietly with takeout spare ribs, that I have questions and want to chat while their mother cooks pasta in the kitchen—this mother who has moved them to one big room just until the divorce goes through—then the girls warm up, like popcorn in the microwave, giggling, elbowing each other, waving crayoned pages, bringing me riddles and jump rope rhymes from school like armloads of zinnias, Leora snatching off Athena’s hat to force a chase around the table. Oh sisters, where did this yearning come from? It knocks me nose over knees like the voice of that young man staffing the counter at Au Bon Pain, who, when I walked in, called, Hey baby girl! a greeting so absurd my face grew hot and I tripped on the toe of my sneaker. Girls, right now, in this suburb where no person claims me, you are my best friends. Set aside my ignorance of private jokes that make you laugh so hard you rush to the kitchen to spit out your Coke; forget that I don’t know whether your hearts slam shut or glow like sun-tipped asters when your dad phones. What makes me think you’ll remember me at all? For years now, my life has been picked clean of children, raked, mowed, sprayed for bees. Not a thing I can do.
Merrill Oliver Douglas is the author of the poetry chapbook, Parking Meters into Mermaids (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, Tar River Poetry, Stone Canoe, Little Patuxent Review, and Whale Road Review, among others. She lives near Binghamton, New York, where she works as a freelance business writer, goes kayaking when she can, and takes Yiddish classes on Zoom.
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What a wonderful poem!