ANOTHER SUMMER OF LOVE
2021
My mother stopped wearing a bra
in the nursing home
because the straps hurt
her shoulders. I called her a hippie
and put a flower in her hair.
—from Rattle #80, Summer 2023
__________
Denise Duhamel: “As a child I memorized Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Land of Counterpane.’ I remember looking up ‘counterpane’ in the dictionary and was delighted to learn that it meant ‘bedspread.’ I suffered from asthma and could relate to Stevenson’s speaker, a bedridden kid. The poem in this issue also has a bedridden character—my mother, who passed away in July 2021.” (web)
