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      February 19, 2020When Your Mother Asks if You’re Seeing Anyone and No Longer Means a TherapistCindy King

      [audioplayer file=”https://admin.rattle.com/audio/KingMother.mp3″]

      It’s tough to find a cardiologist who dates
      patients from the Ward of Cracked Hearts, but
      there’s always the bariatric surgeon
      who thinks you could drop a few pounds. If it’s too late
      for the death row inmate, try the child predator, you too
      could date the would-be senator, or even the President of the United States.
      If you can’t have the priest, don’t give up.
      You too could fall for the charismatic cult leader. You too
      could try the celibate polygamist. Admittedly,
      you’d have to share, and you wouldn’t know for sure
      if you’re actually dating, or whether you’d ever “consummate,”
      but who’s in it for that kind of thing anyway, unless,
      of course, you’d finally give me a grandchild.
      You didn’t spend years in braces only to settle
      for a dental assistant, did you?
      We didn’t correct your overbite just so you could eat
      your dinners alone. It took sacrifice to cultivate your eligibility, years
      of home perms and hand-me-downs, decades of clearance rack cosmetics.
      And yet the people you called friends were privileged
      enough to discover your brain and not your body. BTW, did
      you see that profile pic of the head floating in a jar?
      Though I’m not sure if it’s really enough to love.
      But love you will as everyone does
      toward infinite grace, the axe
      into the olive branch, verisimilitude
      to abstraction, even the sarcophagus toward mummy dust,
      the intellect to its dementia. And I will support you as the mantle
      above the fireplace supports the little box, house
      to your spouse’s ashes.

      from #66 - Winter 2019

      Cindy King

      “I wish I didn’t have to write this poem. Tom’s dead. He was struck and killed by a 22-year-old drunk driver. That’s true. What isn’t? The way the poem characterizes my mother (though I hope to God she never reads it). She does, in fact, occasionally ask if I’m seeing anyone, but she actually means a therapist. And while I gave up on therapy—I briefly saw a grief counselor from the city’s trauma services—I continue to write poems. Poetry, I guess you could say, has been a constant in my life. However, I don’t find writing it to be particularly therapeutic. I’m not sure if I can describe how the sudden loss of your partner—the horror, loneliness, absurdity of it all—changes one’s writing. Only that it does. The fact of it is here, everywhere, in everything I do.”

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