Jennifer Roche
Shopping for My Mother
My mother put on a mask and rubber gloves,
drove herself to the Jewel, like a nurse thief,
to get eggs and half & half.
Mom, let me do that for you.
I’ll let you know when we get to that.
I think we are there.
I add a Heath bar.
Two bottles of white wine.
A blue-inked note
and a bouquet of yellow tulips,
picked up curbside from the florist,
bow-tied with twine:
Mom, I’m sorry I can’t come up to see you,
but I love you, and this will be over soon.
I towel down my missives
with a white disinfectant wipe
that wilts as I go,
and drive 45 minutes on a whispering highway
to leave the parcel on her front stoop.
As I depart, I picture her arthritic hands, freshly gloved,
lifting the brown bag gingerly from her stoop.
She will wipe it all down again in her kitchen.
Then, she’ll uncase her battery-operated corkscrew,
settle into her flower-upholstered chair,
and work her way through a backlog of Sunday Times.
We are going to be fine.
We are going to be.
—Submitted on 04/05/2020
Jennifer Roche is a the author of 20: Erasure Poems of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Alternating Current, 2020). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Storm Cellar, Tule Review, Footnote, Oyez Review, Rain, and other journals. Roche lives in Chicago.
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