The abacus beads of each day slide to the left
until they don’t.
Now her body skulks in a cardboard box
pre-printed with H-E-A-D
at one end, as if someone needs to know
which end might be a Gorgon,
which end to rubberstamp.
When does a body stop being
your mother? The website touts
“climate-controlled”: comfort-speak
for damn cold. I want to invade
her frigid cardboard jail
like a murder of crows,
peck away that bullshit box.
I want to gaze at her hairline—
oh mirror of my firstborn, mirror of mine.
I want to wrap her fetal-curled body
in pre-warmed quilts, layer after layer,
like the pastry sheets of baklava.
And here is where my imagination hobbles—
when her girl-body thaws, what next?
Maybe this was how the first mummies were made—
a natural consequence of love—
the beloved wrapped first for warmth,
then for keeping,
then the happy accident,
how after centuries in the bone-dry wind
on the plateaus of a Peruvian desert,
the love-atoms of their remains
remained.
–
Danielle Lemay (she/her) was Boulevard’s Emerging Poets Contest winner and a finalist for the Patricia Cleary Miller Award. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Poetry South, and many other journals. She lives near Sacramento, California, with her wife, teens, and chickens.