The Ghost of Black Creek Road

The Ghost of Black Creek Road

It’s 1973 and the house is new
Our father holds us spellbound in the living room
inventing the Ghost of Black Creek Road

… and there she is! Our mother makes her way
from the hall, hair dark and slick
with dye, surprised we’re still up, embarrassed

People have always called it haunted
Phantom footsteps on the stairs
Cats meowing when all the cats
have been buried out back in the muck

It’s 2023 and the house needs a new roof
Our mother wears a catheter
I would like to have a little dignity, she says
on the way home from yet another
hospitalization, who would have thought 
I would become the Ghost of Black Creek Road?

I want the light
my mother says, opening the blinds to snow
and once-in-a-generation cold

Birthday Cake

Death comes for my mother in a brown leather jacket.
She tells me the dream is so real. Death has blond 
wavy hair. Death wakes her up, pounding
on the back door of her house.

I got my shotgun, she says. Of course, she means only in the dream.
I don’t know how to use those things. I’d only hurt myself. 
Death turns away, she won’t shoot him in the back, and I imagine my mother
in her pastel sleepwear, hefting the rifle she doesn’t have, hands

trembling. Nothing would surprise me about her, not even the gun, 
though we have never been gun people. I remember how she laughed 
long ago, right after we moved in, when the encyclopedia salesman 
opened that same back door before stairs were built and nearly stepped out

into thin air. One week ago, four hours from here, ten good people 
shot to death in a grocery store. My mother tells me more than once,
I would have given anything to have traded my life for one of theirs.
Especially the one picking up the birthday cake.

My Mother Makes the World a Better Place

Someday I will be an orphan
and then there will be nobody
to remind me that the pointed shape
of my head when I was born 
inspired my father 
to call me Denny Dimwit, after
the cartoon character. My mother

started smoking when she was 14 
and never stopped, third child 
of eight, the troublemaker,
the piss-pot, the girl with a chip
on her shoulder. Now her shopping list
makes my brother cry, it’s so short, 
oatmeal, tears break his voice, 
blueberries. Yes, my mother

will be gone someday, but 
along the way she will laugh and lie 
to the other gamblers at the casino,
pointing at the oxygen tubes in her nose,
pretending she, like them, refused
to be vaccinated, and then the virus 
laid her low, she spent weeks in intensive care
and look at her now.

Beautiful

My mother coughs for the first few hours
every morning. It gets worse
until it gets better. After coffee
and a cigarette, she’s able
to maintain a semblance
of self. She can sit on the couch. 
She can watch Family Feud. She can say,
I felt so abandoned in that hospital
even though I was there, beside her, 
every day for more than a week. 
After supper she can play dice.
It’s hard to look at her hands
so thin-skinned, so gnarled, so old
before her time. The day I drove
six hours to sit by her side, my face
free of makeup, scoured by weeping,
waiting for the ambulance, she said, 
My God, you’re beautiful.