The Last Time I Talked to My Mom
She’d flown to Florida just to die, not that slow-
motion movie crammed with insights and coming-
to-terms, me on the edge of the plains hearing how
one brother and his wife went bedside, sang their
newest version of psalm twenty-three, another one
praying sweet Jesus how can I compete with that,
so you can see why she flew away.
She’d hired a cab to the hospital, told them, it being
the South, she was fixing to die, told me these doctors
they’re whispering cancer as if I can’t read the seven
signs, and they want to try chemo, as if that’s going
to happen, and anyway it was good to hear but I’m
going now and she just let the phone drop, so I
listened to her breathe for a while.
They called soon enough, saying it was a stroke –
that stubborn old lady, dying as she pleased.
Sometimes, She Says
It was my kid asking me and more than once,
so after she was killed, I decided just to quit,
though it was hard, having smoked for years,
and I loved it, I did, maybe out on the porch
a fall afternoon, someone burning leaves two
streets over, a high hint in the cool air, early
moon above the hills, or after sex sometimes,
like in the movies, where you’re the heroine
if not in this story, then another, wondering
how it might go, this whatever seems to be
happening here – cigarette moments to
ornament a tree with a little history, but
my daughter asks again and there’s a crash
that makes her brain swell into a thunderhead
soaking up ocean till it rains itself away, so I
tell myself, just stop, each time you choose
not to is a kind of prayer, and keeping that
it’s like lighting candles in a church, so
maybe it counts – only, sometimes on a street
a match will flare as another’s smoke whispers
of distant laughter, and yes envy and still the
anger over everything that’s lost, and is it lust
or deadly greed infiltrating my breath – this
banished pleasure, this near occasion of sin?
George Perreault is from Reno, Nevada, and his most recent collection, Bodark County, features poems in the voices of characters living on the Llano Estacado. He has received awards from the Nevada Arts Council and the Washington Poets Association and has served as a visiting writer in New Mexico, Montana, and Utah. His poems have been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and selected for fourteen anthologies and dozens of magazines.
