☀ Today's Poem: "Margaret Corinne, Dunseith, North Dakota, 1932" Laura Read

We sit and wait, my sister-in-law says at the deathbed
and I do all day, I am dutiful, I remember the hot church
and the fat angels on the altar and the fan oscillating

by the woman who led us in singing, with one hand
always up in the air. No one knows I am thinking,
Die, die as everyone talks about Jesus and the better place

she is going. Last week my husband pointed at something
invisible and said, Here is the mind, and then he pointed
in the opposite direction and said, And here is you,

and I said, With the daisies, pointing to the same spot
in the air and loving myself hard for seeing a whole field
of them there. But I love myself less when evening comes

and his mother is still drawing her endless breaths up
through her ribs and I can't sit anymore, I am thinking
about the window and how I have to get outside.

I am neither Mary nor Martha. No small pitcher
of water to wash her feet, no sponge for her lips.
When we were alone, I told her things she already knew,

like we were in a play and the audience needed filling in
on what had already happened. She was a good mother.
In her bathroom cupboard, she had the oldest jar

of Vaseline I'd ever seen. A bottle of Emeraude,
green like Oz or something you could drink, the kind
of perfume you tilt and touch to your wrist.

I said, Don't worry, they've still drawn your eyebrows on,
and now I must tell you that all her life she shaved them
and penciled in thick, black lines, she put on a face

because when she was the girl in the photograph,
standing in the cold sunlight of Dunseith, North Dakota,
at the age of three, a stern brother on either side,

she learned she was nothing. And now she is whittled
down to bones and I can see the small flame
of her childhood not going out. I lift the covers

and she is wearing almost nothing and her skin
is so thin that even the sheet bruises it so we shape it
like a tent. As a girl I liked to pretend my sheets

were a meadow where the Velveteen Rabbit lived
and all the other animals I was making real
with my love and my fever, but I didn't think of how

they would have to be burned. This is what happens
with love, I tell her, as I picture the fire swallowing
her body piece by piece, the way sometimes people

eat paper to destroy evidence. I didn't know in death
the jaw sticks open, that the world would keep falling
into it, that we would continue talking to her as if

she could hear us, that my husband would ask
all of us to leave him alone with her for a minute
before they took her body so he could tell her

something secret, like when Joan of Arc
whispered something in the ear of the dauphin,
something we'll never know.