Alison Powell: LIFE LOOP • Cleaver Magazine

Poetry by Alison Powell
LIFE LOOP

a. My mother dreams of Ninepenny, the sign marking it: her father’s land. A stream split down the middle by a crescent of mossy bank. She tells me about it, how they’d kept chickens. In the dream she’s holding one of them and the light of the sun on the creek is bright.

b. My cousin has died but she doesn’t know. My aunt has stopped calling her, can’t stomach the inquiries about her son.

c. She plays piano for the other memory care patients, performing without effort this complex task when other, simpler ones confound. The care facility uses a social app called LifeLoop through which I receive videos: my mother at the piano bench, Chopin etudes drifting from her fingers, her face impassive as her audience.

d. I receive a weekly summary of her activities: Dance FIT, Country Cruise, Creative Centerpieces, Butterfly Happy Hour. I have seen these events take place, have watched the ghost man flipping hinges on a busy board.

e. My father watches CNN, drunk. Some days it seems the world is drunk. My father crouches over, shivering. No matter.

f. Together, we face the impassive neurologist.

g. Who are you to me? My daughter? Well, why don’t I know you? I tuck her in; no blanket is soft enough for this. The pity shimmers through us, lights us up. I am here because…I am the baby.

h. Once there were operas. Her favorite novel: Middlemarch.

i. Witchcraft. For months after her diagnosis, she says I feel I must have done something to deserve this. She was the type to believe in this kind of arithmetic, this brutal ladling out.

j. Answer the phone. Tell time. Bathe without help.

Alison Powell is a poet and lyric essayist, and is a professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University. She is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Boats in the Attic (Fordham University Press, 2022) and a chapbook of lyric essays, The Art of Perpetuation (Black Lawrence Press, 2020).