Joining My Mother for Breakfast at a Downtown Motel
Where I’m sure I’ve forgotten some holiday.
A man who looks older than god sits across from her in the motel’s breakfast room.
They split a maple-glazed donut like she used to do with my father. I’m introduced to Fred, who appears to be bewildered and shuffles off.
“They have plain yogurt and hard-boiled eggs,” my mother says.
She thinks I should be on a diet.
“I’d rather have your pimento cheese in a jelly jar.”
Brochures are strewn across the vinyl table.
Free Underground Donut Tour.
Spicy Chicken and Beer Pub Crawl.
Food of the Gods Immersion Workshop.
“Where did you get these?” I ask.
She rolls her eyes like she’s my child.
“The lobby, where’d you think?”
The cook rings a bell and calls her by name.
“Bea? Your Egg Beater, no-salt, is ready.”
Everyone seems to know her.
“Do you really have a room here?” I ask.
“Is that any of your business?” she asks back.
My mother is eighty-seven and still drives.
A two-door fastback. Minor dents, hubcaps intact.
A man in a hairnet swings by with her plate. “Enjoy, honey!”
My mother pretends not to hear.
She squeezes a packet of ketchup over her eggs,
takes two or three bites, and folds her napkin into a neat square.
“Eating like a bird is a misnomer,” she tells me.
“You’re right.”
“Because birds eat seven times their body weight a day,”
she says anyway.
I follow her into the ladies’ room where she dumps a basket of
tampons into a purse large enough to hold a six-pack of toilet paper.
Today, she only takes one roll because it’s single-ply.
“Not a word,” she says.
“Tampons are good for nose bleeds.” I laugh because she laughs.
The café has emptied. My mother makes one last sweep, eying a
surveillance camera, lingering by tiny tubs of cream cheese and peanut butter.
“Why pass up a good deal?” she asks.
I know how she thinks. Free isn’t stealing, it’s thrift.
My mother asks, “Do you think I’m losing it?”
“No, it’s me. I’m losing it.”
“I said it first!”
I walk my mother to her car while she tells me about Happy Hour.
“Five to seven. Complimentary wine and unsalted pretzel sticks.”
“Is it a date?” she asks me.
“It’s a date!” I tell her.
~~~
(Free Verse)
SAD
(Seasonal Affect Disorder)
the calendar’s voice is dark
even brine salt is gray
an endless hourglass
gray goes black
it still surprises me
sneaks up on me
Time to turn the clocks back!
restlessness creeps in on a drunken moon
my vinyl blinds won’t lie flat
the grimy strings, a midnight noose
who makes up names for all the babies anyway?
i trip on an extension cord
sink into every stain
a million exclamation points pierce my skin
feelings bleed out
my pills run out
i string despondent bras over a mirror
crawl into an empty space
swallow an invisible blanket
wait for mermaids to sing
i’m not thinking a damn thing
but go mad when my rind splits open
ornaments of a broken life
i count backwards
wait for the moon to sober up
even the clock won’t talk to me
can a lizard grow back from a single cell?
i remember floating on the beach under rays of light
a lover’s hand in my pocket
melting loneliness
when i looked good photographed naked
when i remembered my name
the sun must be a lonely star
i’m out of wine again
retreat resign resolve
escape in my nightie to kiss the cold sidewalk
open my mouth like a goldfish waiting to be found.
~~~
(Free Verse)
SENESCENCE
Scurf dangles from my eyelash i flick mottled
skin sticks to the wall wet and winking like
cooked spaghetti a Rorschach no one will eat
my eggs once thick and yearning spill
confetti but never mind days turned
upside down still tick
i turn my wrinkles inside out frail bones move around
more easily in loose skin then buzz half my hair
to remember left from right
who knows if the bra on the doorknob is empty or full?
the hook and eye touch secretly behind my back my
best lipstick breaks I’m contemplating veins
cascading unsupervised like a measuring tape
belt or a noose? ha! vain still rhymes with pain
each breath grows closer together thirst snags on socks
too big for my woes i wonder which pocket
holds the sweetest seeds?
why can’t i climb from the calendar just this once?
tell me I’m not alone.
~~~
(Free Verse)
STATIC
The bedroom smells like furniture polish so
I must’ve tossed the rags in with the sheets again. Light
from the bedside table burns my fingertips. Memories bore into the flaws of my mattress.
Ink grieves across cocktail napkins, on a sales’ receipt, in the margin
of a city map. Air between scraps of paper wants to be truth. Words sound themselves
out as if they’re facts. Silly air words on scraps of paper aren’t
permanent. A hologram on my lampshade: a snake’s severed head can still bite/
the daddy longlegs in my shower doesn’t feel its missing leg. I’ll eat the
Thesaurus if it lies to me again. Insomniacs on my street pipe skunk
weed through my open window as if I don’t worry enough about
the kismet of my lungs. Streetlights squeeze out color in a bottomless annum, turning
walls into Pop Tart pastels like my hair, only painted with a toothbrush.
And under it all, daffodil bulbs hibernate in a brown paper bag on the floor
of the closet beneath N95 masks and a canister with my mother’s ashes
no, remains because how do we really know what’s inside? In the broken night my
neighbor shrieks under a honeycomb moon; she’s lost her house keys again.
Dogs barking at 3 a.m. make you feel like you’re going crazy. Cracking pistachios in bed
has permanently split my thumbnail. I so love the blue-striped Hanes left
behind by my last boyfriend how they bloom recklessly large on my hips, chew on
my thighs; still blood warm stretched-out in the crotch. All those empty
bottles of hotel shampoo float in the tub where an invisible crowd bathes to extinguish
germs we can’t see no one comes to apologize who can sleep?
~~~
(Prose Poem)
LOITERING
I am four years old. Sitting on the edge of the porcelain tub while my mother paints on her cat-eyes.
It is not enough to watch her in the reflection of the tri-fold mirror. I want her to face me, to feel her arms around me, to squeeze me until bedtime. Instead, she sprays her sweeping up-do with Aqua Net.
Eight-years-old.
I still wait.
Now I want to tell you about my mother’s rabbit. It died when she was sixteen. But that’s a misnomer since all rabbits tested died. A few days after being injected, the female is sliced open. Ovaries change in response to hormones secreted by a pregnant human.
Twelve-years-old. I have stopped waiting.
But I want my mother to tell me the lie that everything will be okay.
I am seventeen. My rabbit dies.
My mother’s tears gather on her cheeks.
I am thirty-two. My mother and I come together over the evening news and a cocktail, adult conversations, bookended with laughter—returning to the same stories, family history relived, reorganized, rewritten.
In the memory, she smiles at me. This is why the memory sticks.
Let me tell you about the first day of spring eight years ago? When sunlight reminds me of children reciting a nursery rhyme.
My mother lounges on the loveseat beneath the living room window. She chose the plaid fabric from Sears, her favorite go-to department store. She is hooked to an oxygen tank, shrunken inside her fake-velvet jogging suit, her cat eyes deep in a trashy paperback, living her last moments like clouds in an ever changing sky.
I am in my sixties, standing in the driveway of my mother’s home of sixty-four years.
My mother’s beloved lemon tree is lifeless. Her clay pots, cracked, shriveled roots exposed. No bees or butterflies.
Her hushed voice presses the silence. Does any part of us remain here? Does a house begin to settle in on itself when abandoned? Is it the breath of the occupants that hold it up?
But first I want to tell you about my stepfather of forty years. Lost. Lonely. Vulnerable.
The family fears he has become a host to a parasite who has oddly become executor of the estate and co-signer on bank and retirement accounts. The parasite buys a $90,000 Tesla, registered solely in his name.
While hosting this organism my father loses fifty pounds and dies alone on an autumn day when every branch is leafless.
The parasite drives away.
I want to tell you about the house, empty, the air stale, unable to exhale. A door slams for no reason.
There are alternatives to what I am doing. They just do not interest me.
The parasite nailed a second curtain rod above the front window and hung a thick red blanket; a veil of dull dust, deception and danger.
I climb onto the loveseat in a crossroad of time, sorrow quivering through my bones, and lift the curtain rod from its bracket. Afternoon light bores through the window in flaxen triangles. I am reminded that this is the only time of year when sun touches the deepest crannies of the living room.
I sit on the brick patio under my mother’s orange tree—years younger than me— planted so she could bag fruit for family and friends. Because the tree is alive with blossoms, I stretch my fingers and keep stretching them, knowing healing begins on the uppermost branch.
ABOUT THE POET
Sherry Shahan is a teal-haired septuagenarian who creates art in a small California beach town.
She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Art, taught a creative writing course for UCLA Extension, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry and Short Stories, and Best American Short Stories.
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About the Author
