Bill Mohr

Tomato Skins

My mother called and said a tiny flap
of tomato skin was stuck inside her throat
the way a child who crawled too far might be
Irreversibly encased in a mining shaft.
Portable generators! All night stand by!
I don’t believe she ever again trusted
unpeeled tomatoes. A day or two after,
she called to tell of watching a butterfly
tunnel through her garden, and how a jay
swooped in and netted its flight
in a perishing knot so deft as to yank
invisibility: now that my mother’s dead,
and I don’t have to call her once a day
to see if she’s clamped down on something
unextractable, some taut tarpaulin
of indissoluble paradox, I remember how much
she wanted at the end to fossilize her life again,
with nothing in its misery altered in the least,
not even when she was sobbing at the end of a hall,
“You kids will kill me yet. You kids will kill me yet.”
But she can’t live it again, nor can my brothers
or sisters; I wonder if any of this infundibular
rejectamenta ever existed. There, the crescent.
There, the swallowing, with no return.

 

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Bill Mohr is a professor in English at California State University, Long Beach. Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. His most recent collection of poems, The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana, is a bilingual edition published in 2018 by What Books in Los Angeles as an expansion of the Bonobos Editores version published in Mexico in 2015. He blogs at billmohrpoet.com; his website is koankinship.com.