Lethal
Carol Jean melts into the bed,
a symphony of flesh and bone.
Shadow falters at the sight of her
but advances nevertheless.
In the valley between pillow and sheet, my mother reaches
into the hollow of Carol Jean and remembers
the way she loved her husband.
How she scooped up the moon in soap-cracked palms and
served it for dinner.
How she scrawled her will on watercolor paper and played
Fur Elise on Beethoven’s birthday.
The way she knit hats through the knobs of her fingers
for her grandchildren.
Her memory is interrupted by others,
the edge of a screwdriver down an esophagus.
An ambulance,
morphine’s embrace,
the blink of an eye: a camera.
She suffocates under linen:
respiration betrayal.
In an orthopedic bed, Carol Jean is dressed in her favorite shirt and given back her glasses.
She will have no watch.
Mollie McMullan is a junior at SUNY Geneseo. In her spare time, she enjoys chasing her dog around in circles and cutting up magazines for collages she’ll never complete.