by Alma Ariaz
Your mother doodles
when she talks on the phone.
(You call it doodling, she calls it
scribbling. Both acts serve the same
purpose, but you sense the subtext
behind the distinction.
It isn’t quite clear.
It could not be clearer.)
You used to drag your feet
(Where are the tweezers, the antidote?)
home,
Find grocery lists, adorned
with a massacre (masterpiece)
of blue ink,
Spirals, stereograms
(or maybe just pareidolia)
and angels with chubby cheeks,
Realtors in their effigies, given
curly mustaches and glasses
and pimples.
All of this would connote that
your mother has been talking.
You used to flinch in the face
of onomatopoeia.
Is someone microwaving an egg?
Or have you further
deteriorated, now finding
no sound gentle enough
to keep the arrector pili muscles
from crying out, “Danger”?
(“Though this wasn’t our
evolutionary purpose, your
hypothalamus let us in on a secret:
You are perpetually afraid
for no reason at all,
And that scares you.”)
You grew up
(as was bound to happen),
And learned the importance of
picking your feet up when you walk.
You acclimated to ink-free sheets
of paper and clean lines,
Unclean conscience.
You watched the quirks
take their leave and the lights
empty out the sockets,
And you stared at all the grey
and wondered
when precisely it was
(and how you managed to miss it)
that your mother stopped talking
of a home
with clean flooring.
© Alma Ariaz
Alma Ariaz is a writer from Ontario, Canada. She wrote her first novel at sixteen, scrapped it, and has since been publishing shorter works in literary journals across the web. Her work comprises mostly fiction that is based (somewhat) in reality, as she forces the heaps of scraps she has collected over the years to take the shape of something readable.
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