Portrait of My Mother, Age 56

Mom searches food labels for cancer as she passes
the age her mother’s brain grew crooked branches.
In a gray minivan in a Target parking lot, she tells me
she never made a plan for retirement, never thought
she’d last that long.                                 & I don’t shout
Look at me             I am living           I am doing this
for you, don’t lower the window to Michigan’s frigid
progress to ask the stars how far out the story reaches
with        the two of us idling alive.        I nod knowing
I wear the big eyes of her ghostmother.       Mom waits
for me to leave her.                     Three years ago I tried
to swallow a bottle of small moons & didn’t call her
to say the hospital’s new names           for what the hell
is wrong with me. When I finally told her on the phone
weeks later she asked if it was an accident   & I said no
so she never asked again.                      So we are silent
now             beneath the yellow glow of parking lights:
we are accomplices    or we are strangers          praying
to gods who live on dying stars         fading, flickering.

Stevie Edwards holds a PhD in creative writing from University of North Texas and an MFA in poetry from Cornell University. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Crab Orchard Review, BOAAT, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Clemson University and author of Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). She is the Senior Editor in Book Development at YesYes Books, the newly appointed Poetry Editor at South Carolina Review, and served as the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine from 2010-2020. She lives in South Carolina with her husband and three rescue pitbulls.