Vigilance
A bolide three-foot meteor
crashes into Earth’s atmosphere,
boom, and I think my nonagenarian mother has fallen.
I thud down the stairs.
On another occasion,
instinct propels me to check on my mother.
She falls backward in my room.
With fortuitous timing, I catch her in my arms.
The fire alarm shrieks in the middle of the night.
In a flash, I pound on my mother’s door,
waiting for her to unlock it,
only to be told by the figure
who shadowed me down the flight of stairs
that she’s in India,
a whole other continent away.
It’s hard to imagine a world
without our mothers, my cousin says
on our way to the mall.
We’re always imagining what they’re up to,
even when the seas are between us.
*
Tara Menon is an Indian-American writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. She is a two-time finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award. Her latest poems are forthcoming or have appeared in “AMPLIFY” (Sheila-Na-Gig), “The Sucharnochee Review,” “Tipton Poetry Journal,” “ONE ART: a journal of poetry,” “Blue Heron Review,” and “Grey Sparrow Journal.”
Truth!