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Le Daría Mis Pulmones
Toward the end, she could only
lift a cup of coffee. Closer still,
even that became too much for her,
my mother. A sponge, then,
I’d dip in coffee, or dip pan dulce,
and put that to her lips to suck. That
was all the cancer let her manage.
The IV was her sugar water, and she
the hummingbirds she loved to watch,
busy at the red and yellow feeder.
Those plastic flowers welded on
were poor excuses, but they worked. Whatever
worked, I guess, my mother thought,
lived. On the bed in the living room,
her body of sleeping birds, her dream
of a thousand green wings shimmering like
shreds of aluminum, that could, at any moment,
unloose on the wind. Toward
the end, the sponge and the coffee, the cancer.
She couldn’t smoke anymore either, of course,
because even drawing her own drag: impossible.
So she had me smoke for her—nine years old—
I was her lungs. I blew the smoke right in her face, right
in her face. Just like that, over and over:
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Benjamin Garcia’s first collection, Thrown in the Throat, won the National Poetry Series and the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, in addition to being a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where he received the Jill Gonzalez Health Educator Award recognizing contributions to HIV treatment and prevention. A CantoMundo and Lambda Literary fellow, he serves as core faculty at Alma College’s low-residency MFA program. His poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in: AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. His video poem “Ode to the Peacock” is available for viewing at the Broad Museum’s website as part of El Poder de la Poesia: Latinx Voices in Response to HIV/AIDS.
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Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital (la camo volando), 1932. Collection of Dolores Olmedo Mexico City, Mexico.
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Author: Terence Winch
