Romanticism
I pretend my mother is not sick
but resting. If you guys are feeling anxious
just pray, she texts on the family WhatsApp
and sends us a selfie. For ten
breathless days, her face spreads like cream.
For the first time, I try to imagine her death
and fail, manage only a spelling.
D-e-a-t-h- gloriously abstract, English, like the story books
she would read to me at night, her warm cheeks
pressing into mine. We crossed lands and oceans,
fairy dust, minarets. In the selfie
a translucent tube is clamped
on her nose and mouth. Her hair is wrapped in a blue
bandana with polka dots. A slim attendant
sashays between the gaps, clearing the bedpans.
His helmet is white. He looks like an alien
or God, or Florence Nightingale.
I stare at him for a long time. It reminds me
of being fourteen, alone by the swings
in the colony park, watching the windows
wicking their light, one
by one the people sleeping, and I still sweating
in the hot summer rain. Chip-chip, my mother would call it,
this weather. Hopscotch tiles still visible
under shoe prints. My mother must’ve
worried, pausing by the lamp light, staring at the hands
of the clock. My bony arms were crossed
on my chest, lost in a made-up romance with a boy
or a knight, I let her suffer. I could’ve rung the doorbell
when it began to pour. We could’ve
dried my hair together.
