Page 63 - WTP Vol. VII #1

In Miami my sister makes tapes
of church music from street parades. She got on a plane by herself
because Jesus told her she must. When my sister shook her shoulders in those shirts, she was music. Doesn’t know how to work
the sewing machine, telephone, typewriter, computer. Only a tape deck. I remember her in tailored dresses.
Spangled shirts in pink and baby blue. I want to give my granddaughter
the old life/ but all she wants to talk is bears.
She’s never had a sister/ mambo back from the dead.
My mirrors face each other/ showing infinity/ Jesus is everywhere: the silk flowers and the ceiling cracks/ the pigeons shitting on the sill.
I used to get up to chase them away, until arthritis crippled my hands made me see the pigeons are Jesus keeping company with me.
The only thing I can clearly remember from my own incarceration in the psych ward at Payne Whitney Manhattan
was watching the sun go down/ over twenty lanes of traffic.
I drove all the cars. The rush of thousands of gas pedals pressed,
made me strong enough to swim to Cuba/ Break back in to the old world. Parade music wafts up from the past.
I’ve never driven a car or held a weapon
so I may need to rely on the kindness of bears.
Mosteirin’s novella Nick Trail’s Thumb was published by Kore Press, and her work has appeared in the anthologies code {poems} (Barcelona: Impremta Badia, 2012), and The Waiting Room Reader II (Fort Lee: Cavankerry Press/UPNE, 2013), and
in New York Magazine, The Puritan, Junction Magazine, Poetrycrush, Ozone Park, among others. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, NH, and earned an M.F.A. in Poetry from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College, VT. She is the recipient of the Ann L. Fitzpatrick fellowship to the Robert Frost Place in Franconia, NH, the Liam Rector Poetry Award, and the Sydney Cox Memorial Prize, among others. She is an editor at Bloodrootlit.org.
56