17

In the Multiverse, where multiples of my mother exist, one of them came back 24 years later. She was with me again and it was all that mattered. She called me on the pink princess phone, and I held the receiver to my ear, listening over layers and layers of other conversations on a party line. Still, I caught the message: I could even see her again, could meet in the vestibule at Mount Calvary Baptist, face to face again, lay my head in her lap as the preacher droned. To have her back, just when I thought it was over in this life.

I am Dream Walking again: standing at the nocturnal doorway where dead ones come to visit but never resurrect.

title: you see me

Artist: afiya sunflower

Plate 16