Cling

What will you want at the end?
Perhaps cling peaches–
their brilliant gold tongues speaking
the language of your childhood,
whispering a story about your mother
and sugar, a kitchen alchemy.
Paring knife in hand, she separates
velvet skin from flesh, flesh
from crimson stone, spooning fruit
and syrup into wide-mouthed jars.
Do the drapes billow? How long
will you stay at this threshold?
The key is to leave before
her smile slips, the key
is to fix the memory to the fruit–
warm and luscious and calling you.

* 

Scoured

At 5 pm, dad starts fidgeting
his hands–stroking his shirt collar, gripping
the remote. He presses buttons but
nothing connects. He’s undone from his mind
more each day but will still wash his hands
like the clinician and surgeon he was.
He works up a lather, he takes his time
building ribbons of foam on his knuckles
and palms, until a glistening carpet
of soapy fireflies and curlicues
climbs to his wrists before disappearing
down the drain, a muscle memory
of skill and pride and care and love and self
otherwise scoured clean.

*

The Bees in the Asters

How did I not know that Asters will mound
from their branching habit and weight in a net.

In a net branched from habit and weight
I’m caught up in my father’s dying.

My dad’s dying caught me unready,
unable to ease anything for him.

Unable to ease anything. For him,
I clean, for his caregivers, too. I scrub

and scrub, and the caregivers, too.
All morning I bag pants that no longer fit,

all morning I bag shoes he can’t slip on.
Will the bees in the asters outlive him?

What if the bees in the asters outlive him?
Without him, what do I know? Mounds of Asters.

*

Lisa Rhoades is the author of two collections of poetry, The Long Grass, (Saint Julian Press) and Strange Gravity, (Bright Hill Press). She currently works as a pediatric nurse in Manhattan. Her poems have appeared recently at Rogue Agent, Rust+Moth, and the Southern Review and she is a 2025 SWWIM writer in residence at the Betsy.