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| Image / Gustavo Fring |
Thoughts on Hearing My Mom Coughing
I hate to hear my mother cough
while sleeping in my childhood room at 41.
It reminds me of great-grandma Mary,
who introduced me to Nintendo
and slowly wasted away from lung cancer.
My mother does not smoke,
but her persistent cough still frightens me.
It’s the sound of sickness returning,
of youth spent,
the disintegration that unweaves us.
My mother was beautiful at great-grandma’s funeral,
where she cried and threw herself on the casket,
the first time I saw her cry.
Later, Grandma Simmons took me aside
to the back room of the church.
She made me a coffee,
a 9-year-old with a cup of coffee.
I drank it and said it was gross.
She told me my tastes would change,
that I’d be a grown man drinking coffee every day.
I didn’t believe her.
I couldn’t imagine a gray-haired man,
tired at 9:00 PM,
lying on his childhood bed in Ohio,
listening to his mom’s cough,
echoing great-grandma’s,
at whose funeral I learned I would grow old.
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| Jason Ray Carney |
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