MY MOTHER’S NAME

Two days before the last, after
the seizure had rearranged
my mother’s bearings,
I sat beside her while
the young dark-haired nurse
fluffed her pillow, measured her pulse,
offered to apply
my mother’s signature lipstick,
the Revlon Hot Coral we both loved.
I listened as the nurse asked my mother
to say her name out loud,
and in a gravelly almost-whisper my mother
chose Penny Kosmos—her maiden name
spoken so readily as if she were already
winding back to her beginnings
without us, before me
or my sister, before my father,
back to her girlhood
even to the origin of space
and time, of a world
that so loved her in it.

*

FOR MY COLLEGE BOYFRIEND KILLED IN A PRIVATE PLANE CRASH AT AGE TWENTY-NINE

I see you tall and handsome still,
chestnut hair cut extra short
for your Navy duties those last years.
From the photo you sent me, I noted
a hairline receding just a little;
I like to think you’d eventually be balding
as your tall, professorial father was bald.
I like to think of you again, as my own still-long hair
thins and loses some dark sheen; I like to think of you
as one of us now—some added weight around the middle
perhaps, lines around the eyes and the mouth that maps
a generous life—an older man who once loved so well
an insecure girl-woman of nineteen whose long dark hair
whirled delightfully in the air while you drove her around the city
in your dashing red convertible.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently Her Joy Becomes from Fernwood Press and Marrow of Summer from Kelsay Books. A new collection from Fernwood entitled Belonging Songs will be published in 2025. New poems are forthcoming in Women Artists’ Datebook 2025, The Healing Muse, Braided Way, Delta Poetry Review, Midwest Quarterly, and the Paterson Literary Review.