When mom would mop
you knew not to even think about it.
I mean, you didn’t enter, you’d go hungry
happily. It didn’t hurt
the shake up, moving my grandmother’s table from the kitchen
into the den, not even when examined through the fractured mirrors on the wall.
Nope, not then, either,
because momma would sit on the couch downstairs for a while, and sometimes lie there,
instead of upstairs, in her domain, whence we knew
not to enter. Not to breathe.
But when she cleaned, it was like when I was young
and I woke her up on that couch,
ignoring myself in the giant mirror, the one in the living room that stared
objective and obtuse. And she opened her eyes
as if in a haze and opened her mouth
retrieving three long strands of licorice,
staring at me, bewildered. Then, she put these strands in her nose,
she looked at me, point blank, and said
“I’m a walrus!” before crawling into the kitchen
hands and knees.
So when she cleaned, when she removed the stains from the floor
you kept hungry, full now with something else.
The kitchen would wait.
You’d sit in awe, facing away from the mirrors.
You’d try to hold her hand and ignore the smell of bleach, the residue under her nails.
You’d watch her mouth closely.
