She bends to the quiet thought
of hunger, how best

to manage it. She lifts a cornstalk
from her purse & sticks it

in my ear. There is still more
work to be done. I haven’t

learned how to care for her yet,
how like an animal

she begs to be cleaned when
she can still clean herself.

How intimately I relate to that
on a human level.

Yet she’s never been human.
To me, she’s always been

mother. Some mornings she still
remembers arranging

boxes of cereal so I could choose
my own capricious flavors.

It changed every day. So much depends
upon skim milk & slivers

of bananas. So much depends upon
a spoonful of blueberries

in each bowl. She insists we still
depend on each other, that

I was the baby she tried to bake
immortal in the fire.

I’ve always known she could
chuck me in the oven

if she wanted, just to remind me
how little wit is worth,

how easily life burns away
the wax on your feet, the dry

pine of your hair. She probably
placed me on the coals

thinking ritual is a volatile act,
convinced the skin was a faith

worth returning to—& melting
the fat, watching it liquefy

in the pot, meant more to her
than just hunger, like watching it

harden could solve the problem
of love, of memory, of grief.