Before My Mother Lands in Heaven,
she is a stewardess, flying
through turbulence, never crashing, never
landing. Her skirt is too
short, showing each half-pound
creeping onto her small frame.
She cannot stop to pull
down her skirt or reapply
her makeup or fix her
hair or even drink coffee.
The passengers plead for more
for more drinks for more
pillows more peanuts more sickbags.
Customers call for more quiet
as babies and grown men
howl as fat women pray
to Jesus without a rosary.
She rolls her eyes, correcting
everyone’s grammar in her mind.
Her coworkers are friends. They
roll their eyes as, voices
lowered, they discuss the passengers.
While they stock the cart,
they give everyone nicknames. They
have nicknames for coworkers, too.
They can’t find pillows; they
fill the cart with blankets
or raincoats or sticky uniforms.
They can’t find Dramamine; they
raid their purses for M&Ms
breath mints or hard candy.
Someday this plane will land.
My mother swears that she
will go back to Maine
and never leave. Her friends
and family will all have
to find her there.
Previously published in Blue Mountain Review as “If My Mother is in Purgatory”
Thelma at the Prado
After Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights
Hell might as well be on another planet,
circling a distant, winking star.
Musical instruments litter the parched surface
where the damned swarm out from a shattered bass.
Bosch has tattooed musical notes
on naked bodies strewn across hard stone.
Beside an overturned table, a gap-toothed girl glares.
Balancing a die on her head like a halo,
she sings off-key to a rabbit’s blasts on a pipe.
In the background, all buildings burn.
Sinners break ranks like beetles,
riding knives on the acidic river
to escape the flames and the artist’s gaze.
Originally published at Duane’s PoeTree
Death and the Miser
After Hieronymus Bosch’s panel of the same name
In the end, Death slips in,
the only whiteness in a room
tinged with blood and sweetly rotting
flesh’s infectious pink. Terra cotta curtains
are drawn against a dizzying sun.
Death’s light fingers on the door
smell of absence, not brimstone.
He is a wide-eyed neighbor
looking for gossip, looking for loot
like the green-clad brother who clutches
the miser’s coins for his own.
Death sees the blue-ish angel,
color of marble and the future’s
scrubbing powder, holding out a slim
crucifix. The tiny devil, slimy gob
of spit and ashes, offers a bag
of coins heavy enough to weigh
the miser down.
Nevertheless, Death will not
stride into this crowded sick room,
forcing the dying man to choose
between coins and crucifix, Hell and
Heaven.
He is waiting for the miser
to decide.
Originally published in Setu.
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