Slide Show

Shades drawn
on a summer afternoon,
her smiles enlarged
into the half-dark:
our beautiful mother
dosing in the sun, or tending to us
in our blue and yellow
matching sweaters, hand knit;
in profile, drawing or not
on a cigarette, aware and
unaware of someone’s keen eye –
mostly dad’s. Her long hair
cut, and with it her familiar self,
or so I had feared.

Smiles that rip through decades
of small changes – blurred by
memory like rubbed sienna –
and expose
the contrast in chiseled detail she
must be shocked to see. Then,
must she? Is she? We are
silent. The slides are clicking
dread.

© Burgi Zenhaeusern

Burgi Zenhaeusern writes and translates in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She has participated in workshops at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Her poems have been published in Passager, Innisfree, and Gargoyle.

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