Staying Power #166: "Hug"

An original poem-in-progress

Unidentified painting in the Vatican, photographed by Rachel Radford. Photo titled “the hug” and shared under license CC BY-NC 2.0.

“I feel a poem coming on,” I said to Jihong this morning, as we were headed home from the grocery store.

"Don’t get sick,” he quipped.

---

HUG
Phyllis Cole-Dai

My mother keeps 
losing things.
Eyeglasses.
Inches.
Memories. 
People.
Facts of her life.
Trains of thought.
Lately, words.
Today on the other
end of the phone
she stops
mid-sentence
with a groan.
“Oh, you know
the word I mean . . .”
and I suppose
I do but instead
of rushing
to her rescue
I let her keep
rooting around
in the dusty attic
of her brain
for the three-letter
crate of sound
that contains the sense—
“You know . . .
that thing we do
when we wrap 
our arms around
each other
and squeeze?”
She often says
she’s my daughter now—
introduces me that way
to friends—
as if how to be
my mother’s
mother
were simply
a forgotten
word,
right
on the 
tip
of 
my
tongue.

Reminder: I’ll be out of studio through March 13, with a crazily hectic schedule thereafter until mid-April. I’m not sure what Staying Power will look like over that span. Thanks in advance for your forbearance. All other Raft publications and events will proceed as usual.

The Gentle Nudge

• WEDNESDAY: Creatives’ Coffee (Zoom, 4:00-5:30PM Central, at this link)

• THURSDAY: Poetry Pick-Me-Up (Zoom, 12:00-1:00PM Central, at this link)

View the full Raft calendar.