Today I have nothing to say.
Nothing about the warm wind
or aching blue sky. Nothing
about the last time my mother spoke
regret: she never decided
if she liked jazz or the color red.
I will not tell you when the cancer
was declared terminal, she said
How the fuck would I know how to die?
I can tell you she learned quickly.
I am not going to say I must change my life.
I will not show you the small paper
packet of grief I carry.
I won’t tell you about my first time
in this town, all the motels were full
and I slept in my car behind Walmart.
The next morning at a corner cafe
a man told me to mail two hundred dollars
to a woman in Tucson who would remove
the negative entities attached to my body.
I won’t mention that I saved the address.
There won’t be any angels in this poem.
I don’t know if they exist.
If they did exist, I would tell you
that when Jesse’s baby, Eva Tallulah died,
angels made their way down the moon ladder
through the open window of her room.
I don’t know anything about the other side:
if the light is gold or it smells like rain.
I don’t know where my mother went
after the nurse covered her face with a sheet.
I will not tell you about the ways
she did and did not love me.
It does not matter.
She was afraid.
I held her hand.