Our amaryllis bloomed in the kitchen, burst
into bright spikes. Already it wilts,
drying in the sun that fed it. If I die at 50
I want him to know I hurt

for him, the lifetimes he’s lived,
an adult at 15, twisted
into a sick man’s fantasy, sentenced
to sort reality through warped glass.

When I die, I want a million pictures
of me atop mountains, swimming
in oceans, quietly gazing at landscapes so endless
they can’t begin to fit in the frame.

He cries in my arms and I am his mother
who should have saved him
and my mother, who would be 57 and blooming
but it is we who are alive in this soil.

<<Back to Poetry and Personal