Mothers & Daughters

     My mother folds
herself into the chair
next to the hospital bed
like a
child curls around a scraped knee
frail and
heartbroken
Broken.
Years ago she soothed me from this
position.
I’d fallen fast and hard onto brutal
cement
Humpty Dumpty.
Marveling at the way her cool
soft lips pressed against my cheek,
wet and
blotchy,
gently persuaded by her warm, windy breath
I
cautiously uncoiled my tense muscles.
The cut barely broke the
skin
barely even hurt
I was not cracked,
and
I was free to proceed with being a child.
But now she sits,
fixated with my grandmother’s paper-thin hand,
which
rests still as stone
on the white, sterilized hospital
linen.
My mother closes her eyes, thinking maybe
of
her own past scraped knees,
and of the scars that still sting
with unavoidable consistency
bone-deep,
bruises on
her heart, like the soft spots of a peach
and the woman who, so
decrepit now,
used to kiss the pain away.

Gone.
Broken.
I watch the ceiling, watch the
floor, watch anything
that will offer me the coldness of

blank, meaningless objects.
This cut is deeper, out
of my realm of pain index
gnawing at the bone, gnawing at
reality
like a painter scraping away dried, chipped
color.
And I know my mother does not have
the
strength
to kiss away anyone’s pain,

especially her own.
And all she can do is fold
herself into
the silent sturdiness of the
chair.
Gone.
Broken.