by Carl Boon
In this small room surrounded by people who only whisper, I think about my mama. They’re gonna walk me, shackled, to the room at the end of the hall at 1:15 and prepare the medicine they’ll put in my arm. The minister’ll be there—the same old one who smells like a swimming pool—and the rest of the faces that make my narrow world. They’ll ask me what to say and I won’t know what to say. I don’t want this food they’ve placed before me. I don’t like Georgia anymore.
My mama wore bright pink jeans and strutted through the living room while she dusted. She was the mama next-door Janie wanted and Mandy from across the street. You could see her belly when she cooked, with the tattoo of a train going somewhere, and that was where I wanted to go. It didn’t matter it was only mac & cheese. It didn’t matter if there was no milk. Mama was fierce, and that’s what mattered.
Mama was elastic in her high-heeled shoes and moved well, licking spoons as if they were the cocks of former lovers, verbose if she happened to be sipping from that Southern Comfort she tried to cover in that grocery sack under frozen vegetables. Peas and carrots; no one ever ate them. My brother was ardent with the barf. He hated her with the frenzy that I loved her. Why’d she die?
It must’ve been the blue pills in the long run, the blue pills she swirled in her left palm before they disappared down her slim, white throat. It must’ve been the reason she sat me down and put the cartoons on, which turned to sitcoms then to game shows, so I was alone. Some nights men slipped through the kitchen door when I was small—for I was just a shadow then—men who smelled like beer and cheap cologne. The grunting faded or I fell asleep; I can’t remember which came first. It was always rainy in the morning.
It occurs to me now this morning was my last, my last taste of milk, my last packet of sugar, my last fractured recollection of a dream. Mama was so lucky not to know—she just fell back to bed one morning and didn’t decide to get back up. She kept her sins hidden from anyone who cared, and murdered with neglect; I did so through need and they got me. They never got her because she was brittle and flamboyant. I’m hard, they say.
It’s gonna be the end of me in seven hours time. It took her 27 years of pills and nightmares, whoredom and occasional trysts with Jesus. They’re gonna put me in the ground in ugly clothes beneath a very small stone and there’ll be no getting up again no matter the miracle of Jesus. Swimming-pool man will offer a prayer and there I’ll go into the Georgia night. There I’ll go and Mama will be waiting, laughing, asking me if I’ve been looked after.
Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.
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