The Seance.pdf (43.45 KB)
The Seance
The medium said the spirit gives her
certain words. Today it’s
haricot verts.
My mother would send the meal back
if the green beans were at all crunchy.
How dare you serve this to me, she’d say
and since she’d died, once in a while,
I’d say
how dare you in her accent
and we would laugh with love about it.
She said she’d had a beautiful life,
or, rather, that her life was a thing of beauty.
Some thought she was weak, the youngest
of eighteen, but she was strong. She said
she would sit back and observe
to find out who the assholes were
and some people thought that reticence
meant that she was slow.
When she was here, she says,
she stood up for things. My mother
now wants to discuss Roe v. Wade
through the medium. I know she
would have thought of her brother
who served the longest sentence
in her country’s history. Of the fight
between her parents when he
was conceived, how her older sister
tried to stop it by throwing a piano
bench, how that original conflict
seemed to haunt him into gang life.
I think about how when he escaped
he phoned my mother; how she helped
him without question, until
it was clear he had been in jail so long
he had to go back to survive.
I'm comforted that given this one chance
to say something, my mother from the dead
says this. She also says it is my job
to find some joy every day.