My mother who though she was not herself an eater of crackers in bed often brought a ginormous bowl of popcorn which she would eat undaintily like just a fistful of popcorn shoved near her mouth the way I eat popcorn unless I am not alone which I do not really prefer and always in her other hand was a novel usually a thriller never a romance always either a woman killing several men or a sister stealing another sister’s kidney or a surgeon purposefully botching a heart procedure and I would be at mother’s side also fisting popcorn and reading the big horoscope book because there was so much information like what would my sex life be with an aquarius or why to avoid earth signs and also career how according to the stars with my attention to detail I should be a phlebotomist or an instructor of ballerinas and sometimes I’d bring her a warm washcloth or I’d be hungry and she’d say just let me finish this chapter or there’d be one of those magazines with famous people and even of the mildly attractive famous men mother would say well I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers and I’d imagine that flat paper face fat and fleshy in bed with us a couple of sleeves of saltines and the crumbs different from our hard little kernels and then I’d go into the kitchen and stand at the sink hollowing out the strawberry stripe of the Neapolitan before checking the windows for strangers. There: my glassy face, the indifferent moon, the treeless street.
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Nicole Callihan’s latest book is This Strange Garment published by Terrapin Press in March 2023. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets.