Sean Mahoney
On the Luxury of Saying What I Feel
Bumblebee sipping from one Morning Glory before moving on…
It’s after Mother’s Day and I shudder at what we’ve let happen
to the country she grew up in. We let skin create graft and free
pass and monopoly. We allowed for collateral distraction
as entertainment. We created mergers and corporate personages.
Easy ‘cop’ outs. Comfortable lobby spume. We fettered our private
lives and socialized our pains and aches. We walked, cautiously,
just to the store across the street while someone remained at home
wondering if they would ever see us alive again. We swallowed
Trimmed branches of a super seedy lemon variety with large…
the echo and the chamber. We swallowed truths and forgot how
to regurgitate. And the bitter pills we suppositoried, believing
their eventual dissolution would spare our throats the anguish
of shock and awe. We believed sophomorically treaty and pact
wrought in the sweat of people created brotherhoods. We believed
that arrangements were what sets of parents had with each other
Barbs, and finches darting up to the roof out front behind blinds…
and that that was their business. We would never raise an eyebrow
at the sanctity of their union, the profundity of their labor. And we
never leveled as a dis the fact that ‘she persisted’; for that is indeed
what mom did – literally for years – as well as in the grander scheme
and in refutation of troll-bait memes where mom inhabited the role
as protector of all her babes, using climate and warming as weapons.
And pane of the dining room window and all jiggles on the face…
We allowed for human beings being shot by itch or polemical
inner intuition. We allowed for our ovaries to be manipulated
and tokenized and for our testicles to generally create that special
kind of chaos boys routinely swine in. What carries this country for-
ward with its arrogant swagger? And what if, by writing any or all
of me, a retooled AUMF S.J. 59 enables this one or the next in another
Of the water in the vase holding a single, bare stemmed peach rose…
2 years to spin me away in dark ‘detention’ indefinitely? This is not
my mom’s country. This land is colder. Much colder. More vacuous
with bubbles, less nutrient-nourishing womb. But mom finds pockets,
tiny isles, and perhaps that is enough for now she says rocking me asleep.
Bumblebee sipping from one Morning Glory before moving on
Trimmed branches of a super seedy lemon variety with large
Barbs, and finches darting up to the roof out front behind blinds
And glass of the dining room window and all jiggles on the face
Of the water in the vase holding a single, bare stemmed peach rose
An idea of new building,
of scratching one’s way up,
of suffering repeated stings,
is simply not enough love.
Sean J Mahoney lives with his wife, her mother, two Uglydolls, and three dogs in Santa Ana, California. He works in geophysics. He believes in salsa, dark chocolate, and CBD. Sean helped create to the Disability Literature Consortium (www.dislitconsortium.wordpress.com) and co-edited the first 3 volumes of the MS benefit anthology Something On Our Minds.
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