Ice Cream
I call my mom. I walk to the beach. She is driving to Montana
to hike. I miss the daily talks and walks we had when we
were two times zones apart. Now it’s ten. And hard to snatch
moments when we are both awake and wanting to pontificate. Today
Today I need my mom. The woman whose theme song for us was
You and Me Against the World. It was. Still is. She drives, I walk.
Weave in between cyclists and scooters and oblivious joggers, music
too loud, all traveling the same seaside sidewalk. I tell my mom that
is what life is like here. A small patch of desert and we are all trying
to breathe. How are you? I know I can tell her the truth. Even if it will
shake the ground beneath her, I know this because she loves the way
I love and I say, Mom it’s hard. I’m grateful, I’m blessed, but
I am sad all the time and sometimes it is hard to hold all the sadness. She says,
oh baby the way I talk to my babies, no longer babies. And she listens while she
drives through her night and her desert, as wide as my sea, as wide as her arms
I know hold me with their silence. I empty my heart through the phone and feel the
morning salty breeze tousle my hair and I’m nearing the end of my mama
morning walk and I see on the steps up away from the Sea a mama and her daughter
and I see me and my mama. Tell me, she says, and I tell my mama about the
little girl, no bigger than two holding her bowl of ice cream as big as her face covered with
curls and sunscreen. Sitting in her purple frilled bikini bottom, soft belly sticking out.
Shirtless she scoops the tiniest most precious bits of ice cream, closing her eyes with every
single bite, as if she were being saved by the sugar and cream and I start to tear up
watching the joy of a little girl.
Tara Zafft has a BA from UCSD and a PhD in Russian Literature from University of Bath, UK. She has published in the anthololgy, Rumors, Secrets, and Lies: Poems about Abortion, Pregnancy, and Choice; Write-Haus, Aether Avenue Press; The San Diego Poetry Annual; Vita and the Woolf Literary Journal; and Dumbo Press.
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