Mom, at Home
by D. R. James

To caption her black-and-white flippant pose–
her smile real, her hair teenage dark–the musty
yearbook quips, “Good things: small packages.”

At five-two but buoyant on tennis calves,
she claimed she flunked college chemistry
from too much fun in pre-war Chicago,
finally free and far enough from home.

In high school (“back in the Depression …”)
she and the girls and current boyfriends
would escape to secluded cul-de-sacs
in abandoned developments, fix headlights

on the discs of smooth pavement and dance till
Cleveland’s midnight to the Dorseys, Goodman,
Miller, and Harry James on the radio,
Artie Shaw her favorite–A Strange

Loneliness. Moonglow. “You kids don’t know
how to dance,” she’d tell my 60s sisters,
eyes sparkling, mouth slightly parted, her teeth
still white as a commercial girl’s. Until

somebody’s wedding, I only saw Mom
dance big-band behind an ironing board
to the tunes on TV shows, the long arms

of my father’s white shirts, damp, unrolled
from the basket, opened wide and empty,
flattened, pressed, first one, then the other.



 

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