A mother poem
       

My mother is a bag of flour.
On the third day, she jumps—
in the sudden birth of dumplings
every barge drifts and displaces
fish, their gullible mouths wide open
as the undersides of tambourines.
She gathers them wriggling into her white apron.

Under the moon, the city of my heart breaks
with the river and turns into a country-
and-western monologue. Mother in the misted
drape of her cloud sweeps past—
cats swat heads and tails in her storm-wake,
the scales heavy with soup-broth and the water
braced for the enormity of her foot.

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Copyright © 2014 Tom Useted All rights reserved
from Third Coast
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission