Cholina
When my mother dies
I learn I never knew her.
But she told me two stories,
two girlhood miracles.
At ten she saves her family
from a crocodile stalking
in a river outside Managua
where they bathe.
She is on the banks,
no desire to wash that day.
I like to imagine she is dancing
among wild red macaws.
Then a woman the size
of a votive candle, draped
in the colors of wild macaws,
appears on a branch up in a tree.
Never afraid,
my mother only shouts
so that the bathers might come out
to greet The Visitor.
Which they do,
gliding out from the river,
one by one, dizzy
with water-play and sunlight.
When the last cousin
looks back and notices
a crocodile surface and stir,
everyone is relieved.
The Visitor then lifts up
through the leaves, her colors
flushing with sky until she’s gone.
It was a kind of assumption.
The second story lacks
the detail of the first. At thirteen,
my mother falls off a horse.
Her spine should have snapped.
That same spine
finally kills her in the end,
at forty-six—
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
On the day she tells
these stories, she thanks The Visitor,
whom she believes keeps logs
of God’s unfinished business.
She also thanks
The Visitor for granting her
the years she got to move,
breathe,
speak,
eat.
And more than that, of course,
she slurs
through her half-palsied face,
meaning me.
Last Year
In January, we relocate
the sickbed into the sunroom
because we can no longer
help my mother elsewhere.
Later a silver finch zips
through the open screen door
and spirals around bursting
with a small but unruly anthem.
After hopping from wicker chair
to china case, it stages a sunlit
display of shadow puppetry
from within a lampshade,
before tumbling out to puff
its chest atop the metropolis
of medicine bottles at bedside.
My mother has had enough.
Closing her eyes, she shoos
the silver finch away.
She did not get to see
the bird lift springlike
into the chill of December.
Pigeons
Today I learned to love the pigeon.
I love them perched fat on fences,
Cooing like purple-hatted women
Who in the depths of their senescence
Become filled with revealed religion.
I watch one waddle towards a puddle
Busy with birds stiff with brighter colors
Sipping daintily around sludge bubbles.
Then her greyness plunges into the gutter.
They disperse. She bathes and chuckles.
When an empty-handed curmudgeon
Plops himself on their cherished park bench,
They had planned for their revenge––
His bottom now plastered with excrement.
Today I learned to love the pigeon.
About the author :
Michael Angel Martín was born and raised in Miami, FL. His interests include stringed musical instruments, Santos, and mall food. His poems and reviews can be found in or are forthcoming in Dappled Things, Anglican Theological Review, Apogee/Perigee, The Offbeat, Green Mountains Review, Saint Katherine Review, The Mondegreen, Pilgrim, Presence, Jai-Alai and elsewhere.
