April 02, 2025

I wrote this poem the day after my mother's most recent visit with her neurologist. My mother was diagnosed with MS before I was born. She is in a later stage of MS now, and her brain is atrophied and covered in lesions. She's from a factory town in Northern Canada. I wrote an essay about it here.

Lovely Mother, Deadly Sky

My mother was a child once
and she ran in prairies
with hair blond like light,
mountains of grey smoke
hiding summer from the sky.
I imagine her in a spring dress
sipping on something cold,
innocent to the violence
of her working-class destiny.

Older she ran on cement
looking for sorrow
in a bottle of beer.
Older she made love to men
who did not deserve it.

When she was a child herself
she killed the one she ached
and cried its death for eternity.

In church she sat and felt
Jesus' presence in the hollow
of her bones. A martyr too,
pious in her hatred for the world.

Where was I to tell her,
"Mother, run away
before the smelter
kills your brain"?
Now she looks at the city
without knowing its name.

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