PICKING UP A PRESCRIPTION FOR MY DAUGHTER AT THE RITE AID THAT REPLACED THE RITE AID WHERE MY MOTHER PICKED UP PRESCRIPTIONS FOR ME
Maybe there is no explaining that a patch of grass
was once not a patch of grass—
that if it took twenty years to tear down,
erect one building,
it also took twenty years to
sell the house on Seymour,
pack the soup spoons,
the sandwich maker—move, move again,
move back. In the place where a doctor
once splinted my ring and pinkie fingers together,
where my mother once rocked my sister
in a stationary chair,
imagine a soft fluff of bunny burrows
in tall grasses,
a single bee makes
for a break in the dandelion heads.
Where once a pharmacist shifted
for hours between pill bottles and bandages,
imagine a doe leads her fawn through
fir needles, a birch branch breaks,
falls, remains. Where once a display
of cough syrup took the shape
of a Christmas tree, imagine
I am emerging from automatic doors,
plastic bags full of half-off Halloween candy,
a humidifier, lozenges for the long night to follow.
Imagine telling my daughter,
wide-eyed and new as morning
that my mother was also a girl once
nestled in a lap that would one day nestle me,
would one nestle her.
TYPO
29
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