<div class="line">Last night</div>
<div class="line">you tossed your girl-child high</div>
<div class="line">above a cloud for someone else to catch.</div>
<div class="line">I screamed but you didn&#8217;t listen. You strode</div>
<div class="line">over, made a fist &amp; busted</div>
<div class="line">in my brain. I gasped, choked on</div>
<div class="line">your fingers as they scraped &amp; clawed</div>
<div class="line">my dream to death. Sated, you sat</div>
<div class="line">down on the ground, watched your sweet babe</div>
<div class="line">stumble, tumble head-first onto into</div>
<div class="line">through your criss-crossed legs.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">This morning</div>
<div class="line">I jerked upright.</div>
<div class="line">I thought I saw your sun-</div>
<div class="line">soaked face swimming in fantasy</div>
<div class="line">&amp; fairy tales, a smile trickling,</div>
<div class="line">tricking me to reach, beseech you …</div>
<div class="line">Come to me, my daughter.</div>
<div class="line">Let your mama chase the cobwebs from your worn-</div>
<div class="line">out soul &amp; wash your future clean.</div>


The Question Ever

For the Archaeologist Who Has Been Studying Stones for Eighteen Months

Mama’s Nightmare

<p style="padding-left: 0px;">talk on the telephone bemoaning<br />
our fragility, senility &amp; amazed that we<br />
are still alive surviving Medicare, losing<br />
hair in clandestine places, not remembering familiar faces&#8230;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">Then the topic somersaults &amp;<br />
skids into lovers of times past: <em>Tristan<br />
&amp; Isolde, Anna &amp; Count Vronsky, Alfredo &amp; Violetta,<br />
Leopold &amp; Molly</em>. We are still enthralled<br />
with the tastes, the smells, the touch of men who<br />
metamorphize us as if longing in the <em>Garden of Eden</em><br />
sucking on the fruits of love.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">Even terminal illness or a seventy-year-old<br />
who walks with a cane, others who bring us their &#8220;once<br />
upon a times,&#8221; their tired masculinity, their myth-making, even<br />
men who are catheterized, crucified men who crave more but live<br />
with damage women, men who reside across the border<br />
all desire us as we do them, light fires in us &amp; mire<br />
us in their half-demolished lives.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 0px;">&amp; there is always the one who<br />
will crisscross our whereabouts forever&#8230;better than <em>On the Road<br />
with Kerouac</em> &amp; more titillating than <em>Travels with My Aunt</em>.<br />
Each of us in love with one of the above&#8230;<br />
two old broads sister-like languish in the language<br />
of intimacy &amp; poetry, artists &amp; medieval writers like Chaucer<br />
&amp; his <em>Wife of Bath</em>, the next doctor&#8217;s appointment,<br />
sleeping too much, too little, mostly roaring at ourselves for being<br />
us, for strutting our tainted bodies with just a bit of fuss &amp;<br />
savoring       salivating       quenching our thirst<br />
on every solitary moment&#8230;</p>


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March 9, 2017Mama’s NightmareJ.B. Bernstein

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March 9, 2017Mama’s NightmareJ.B. Bernstein

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