ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 75
Slow, Low Eyes That Look Like Mine
Kaycie Barr
I enter my mother’s house with the spare pair
of keys, ripe with the smell of cat piss stained
on the Christmas tree’s skirt. Stairs
to the left, I ascend, recognizing some strained
wails, moans, jibber jabber of claptrap
blathering—my mother lays on her backside
behind her locked door. I ad-lib an old scrapped,
script, lips lodged into the door’s jamb, applied.
“Mother, open the door. Mother, Mother!” I fire
a tap, tap, knock, knock, bang, BANG—drumming
my knuckles ketchup red and wired,
feet on the runner, over and over, I chew over tumbling
words as minutes buckle over
and over, “Jus-s-st a min-n-u-u-t-e, oh-h—”
but this doorknob is understood to be some closure
undone by a child with a bent paperclip—no,
it’s not working this time,
“Open the door! Can you?” I implore,
slamming my shoulder into the door’s spine,
“Mother, open the DOOR!”
“Jus-st-,” another undone paperclip try,
I strike the lock, the door revealing
her, a sloth on her back, slow eyes
emptied by low blood sugar and disease.
A glimmer of saliva bubbling down
from her gaping mouth to bare wrinkled breast,
a shirt wriggled eschew, a sight owned
and yet too intimate within the peeled darkness.
I don’t want to do this anymore,
I don’t want to
do this. I could leave her,
I could—
They come, insert an IV.
Glucose fluid quick to the blood stream,
one glass of orange juice, a fast made forgiven
peanut butter sandwich, a gleam
of nonchalant gooeyness to my ears in the room,
I sit on the stairs, chewing my cheeks, corded by the womb.
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