Our Lady of the Locked Unit
by Kathy Nelson
From the valley of the shadow (Haldol, Risperidone), my mother
wakes, happy as a warbler in pine forest. She’s forgotten how to walk
but stands from her wheelchair, teeters like a baby bird surveying air,
or like Rodin’s Old Courtesan, or like the cripple at Capernaum.
This would be a story about miracles if it weren’t so full of sorrow.
Instead, I’ll call it transfiguration.
Hello, Beautiful! she sings out
to the CNA. To the med Tech, I love you! (No matter her serrated
syllables, he’s always cooed darlin’, perfect, kissing her cheek,
slipping Valium-laced vanilla pudding between her teeth.)
In the dread-crippled, arthritic, word-terminal, decay-doomed room,
the lunch-tray clatter slows and a line forms—the beleaguered faithful
gather for the Holy Mother’s blessing. (And I, her famished acolyte,
don’t I ache too for that beneficent gaze?)
Good morning!
her bony palms enfold, caress the maintenance man’s fleshy hand.
Kathy Nelson, 2019 recipient of the James Dickey Prize (Five Points), is a graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Find her work in her chapbooks, Cattails and Whose Names Have Slipped Away, and in LEON Literary Journal, New Ohio Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
