#004 Cleveland Street

A poem

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My mother stands at the sink washing her mother’s dishes.
We’re selling the home and for the last time i watch light yawn
through the lace curtain, dapple her skin in such a way 
that i am six again laid out with her under the backyard oak, 
whose leaves stamp hands of shadow and light on her cheeks,
and when the light shifts an adoring slant across her lips it almost
seems there are two of her smeared like oil paints or
a car window congealing highway, mountains, trees 
but i blink, the moment douses and she is still tending
her dead mother’s dishes when water seeps over the counter edge
and wets through our socks. Better to leave it, she says
and undeterred, we carry on.