POETRY

Before the Hospital

By Mary Angelino     Auburn Witness Poetry Prize 2019 Honorable Mention
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Mom earned her cleaning jobs through word of mouth.
Her clients liked an English-speaking maid.  
Sometimes I helped and on the way she’d rush 
through what she knew: who’s a second wife,  
an almost third, who won homecoming queen,  
who leaves too many Post-it notes, 
who’ll put their mother in a home, who marked 
her calendar for the double mastectomy   
and said, What could be worse than dying young, 
handing Mom a garbage bag of clothes, 
the tags still on. To keep it fair, we divided 
 
the houses. I always took the bottom floor,  
worked room to room, learned how to live  
in the task ahead. Often, I would forget she was upstairs
until I heard her footsteps, a song half-sung.  
I used to want the grand pianos  
and white fences, the mosaic paths leading out  
to the view. Now, I want her elbow-deep  
in a bucket of rags squared from our old T-shirts;  
how she split the supplies, explained everything’s use–
how there is a best and easiest way.


MARY ANGELINO has work forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review. Recent publications include the Best New Poets 2017 and 2015 anthologies, Spillway, and Prism International. Her manuscript, The Unspooled Room, was a semi-finalist for the Crab Orchard First Book Award, the Sexton Prize, and the Miller Williams Prize. She lives in Santa Clarita, California, where she is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at College of the Canyons.


VOLUME 52.3