Dashing
       

What's funny is my son calling me
an hour into his Door Dash shift:
Mom, I'm having a bit
of an emergency.

I'm thinking rear-ended, injured, totaled the car.
The light turned green and someone jumped
in front of me, so now there's milkshake
all over the passenger floor.

Funny because my son is still alive, because the emergency
turned out to be whipped cream, four long-stemmed
maraschinos, the red not of blood,
the emergency solved

with a bucket and sponge. What's funny is my healthy son
hosing down the floor mat, handing a solicitor a twenty
for a measure to make Medicare for all,
asking so what's it like

going door to door as the sticky sweetness
floats toward the street. What's funny
is I'm healthy too—nothing broken,
nothing a little ibuprofen

and yoga won't cure. So often I forget my lines,
fall in and out of line, want to fall to my
Chablis because, as Jack Gilbert says,
the heart in its plenty hammered

by rain and need. And when he writes the sound of a stone
hitting / a stone in the dark...I mean, think about that
for a sec: a stone hitting a stone,
not in the sun

or under florescent tubes, but in some dank place
so opposite of a son coming home with rosy
splatters on his navy-blue shirt,
what could be shards

of catastrophe scrubbed away. The floor mat's dripping
on the side porch railing. Okay, Ma, I'm Dashing
again. Waving, slowly backing out,
into the pink-tinged dusk.

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Copyright © 2022 Martha Silano All rights reserved
from Colorado Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission