LATER, LATE
by Laurel Rust
Looking over poems
written during my mother’s dying,
scrawled hastily in moments
in bad penmanship, the words feel
nearly careless now, imprecise,
though they were written
when every moment felt crucial,
pinioned in the excruciatingly formal
context of her dying.
So be it: I needed
to spill out, go rogue, mess up
the whole hopelessly sterile,
rational scene. What words
could fully hold this?
I did my best, grabbing
what I could, of mom,
of me. She was prose,
one curled up sentence
on the bed, head to toe.
Dying. I was
all over the place.
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