Tea Song

The kettle boils in the kitchen, I hear it from the yard. She is up to mill about, put her hands in the washing machine.

To identify what she wants is to offer as much as I can give and hope it is enough. Today, it is mushroom soup and mothering.

When I was young and ill and crying, she laid on me to suffocate the sickness from my body and whispered, ‘Your tears are salty because someone loves you.’

We have spoken about her death three times. She told me, ‘Burn me to a crisp and chuck me in the sea, or set me in a teapot on your mantelpiece— now go inside, don’t see me like this,’ lighting a cigarette and crouching by the door, make-believing I couldn’t see her. Next, hurricane-drunk and driving too fast, she admitted: ‘my nerves are rubbed raw by the brine in my blood, I can’t feel my feet.’ I asked, ‘It’s in me, too? Sometimes I act just like you.’ ‘No, tesoro, the world just revolves around you.’

And now, when her body is peppered with x-rays, she spits out their medicine like she spat on me. She called me weeks ago:

‘I am lonely and frail, stay for just a night, I beg of you.’

Her head wrapped in gauze; her fingers could not reach to grab. She sips soup and sleeps off the medicine and I cannot take my eyes off the kitchen window.

‘Why is she making tea on so hot an afternoon?’

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WASHU IN ST.LOUIS‘26

ACRYLIC & COLOREDPENCIL