Mother-Daughter Duplex

By Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum

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The daughter moves the mother from home to nursing home. 
In each suitcase are purple garments of dying.

The daughter folds lavender garments into drawers.
The old woman is fed and folded into clean sheets.

To be old is to be rolled and diapered like a baby daughter.
On blush pink sheets a baby daughter is begun and born. 

A daughter grows old in sorrow for her mother’s death.
Death’s luminous violet haloes grieving eyes. 

The old woman’s milk-blue eyes yearn for her daughter.
The daughter holds her mother’s hand too tightly.

Old hand, paper and bone, letters blur into cobalt dusk.
The old woman has no home except her daughter’s touch.

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Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum was born, raised, and educated in New York. Mary’s translation of poet Felix Morisseau-Leroy has been published in The Massachusetts Review and the anthology Into English (Graywolf Press). Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Lake Effect, Spoon River Poetry Review, Barrow Street, and elsewhere.

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• 9/12 / Poetry Reading in partnership with Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), celebrating its 20th year, with visiting poet-in-residence Jordan Pérez + SWWIM’s own Alexandra Lytton Regalado / Conversation moderated by Letras Latinas’s Laura Villareal to immediately follow / The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7:00 pm EST / Free

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