The New Old
Maybe had I stayed longer. Or left sooner. Disconnect—how
I describe what is or isn’t going on inside
my post-stroke mother. The other night she ushered
my wife & I outside to witness the planetary alignment, in-
sisting the neighbor’s low red boat light was Mars, the other string
of pulsings, the other astral bodies she couldn’t name but knew
must be tethered. All her conversation broken. Often I
refrain. Wait as she closes her eyes, conjuring. Until she looks
(blinking) at me still gripped in the brink of. If I can’t connect the spurts,
can’t illicit or cipher or project, she’ll abandon the thought altogether,
offering I don’t know. The afternoon after the freak
snow melted she began When you see a cardinal it’s like a memory or—.
And instead of finishing the dead, returning—, I barely nodded.
LGBTQIA+ artist, NEA and MacDowell Fellow, and former Key West Poet Laureate, Flower Conroy’s books include Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder, A Sentimental Hairpin, Greenest Grass, and Zoodikers: A Bestiary. In addition, she’s/they’ve co-authored And Scuttle My Balloon with Donna Spruijt-Metz. Conroy is currently working on a series of Ephemeral Altars that celebrate poetry through assemblage art which can be found on her social media sites.