I believed for several days my mother
Was back in the house with me. We heard her at night,
a whirring in the corner
where she'd sat in her chair watching MSNBC.
We never got along. She called me fat most of my childhood
and before she died, she'd been
difficult in other ways:
She kept spilling the medicine on the nightstand
beside her chair. She'd grab my hair and yank me
I fucked up so bad cooking for her
we resorted to baby food. She one time handed me
a paper cup: when I looked inside there was a perfect
swirl of shit; she lay back down and would not even
watch television.
She said things that didn't make any sense:
there were people standing in the yard watching
the house (there weren't).
She waited on people who'd been dead forever.
My grandfather was coming
Home from his rig and would be bringing her
To school this week.
I'd suppressed good memories of her.
We listened to Loreena Mckennitt and
The Cranberries on repeat. We made fun of the same
people in church: the woman in choir whose voice sounded
like gears grating.
We had the same small hands—
We never pressed them together but they might have
Been a perfect fit.
The whirring turned out to be the guest bedroom's window unit,
which kicked on automatically, quietly
so as not to shake the whole house.