Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
Your hands, invisible
under your hair,
shells over your ears.
I can’t hear you.
Even now you are six
around your mother.
Your mother
is becoming invisible.
She’s 76—
morning pills, thinning hair.
She walks right past you,
whispers nothing in your ear.
She never wore ear-
rings, lipstick. This mother
stunned you
subtly—invisible
make-up, undone hair.
More beautiful at 56
than some women at 36.
Your hands cover your ears—
those pills mean nothing. Her hair
isn’t thinning. Your mother
isn’t inching toward an invisible
circle on the calendar. You
forget death, drinking your
coffee, reading the news, six
a.m. It’s there, an invisible
deadline taunting in your ear—
your mother
won’t be in your hair
forever. Thinning hair.
Morning pills. You
will lose your mother,
as you lost your father at six-
teen. Put your ear
to the phone, speak to her invisible
face. Your mother used to comb your hair,
invisible snags that made you
cry. You were six. She soothed into your ear.
Melissa Fite Johnson, a high school English teacher, is the author of A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, winner of the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Broadsided Press, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. Find her online at melissafitejohnson.com