My Mother Says, "I'm Going to Flush the Toilet Now"
       

at the end of our call. She wants me to know she wasn't peeing
while we spoke, just hiding in the bathroom
so my father would not know we were on the phone.

This morning she helped the young men from down the road
unload the hay into the close darkness of the hayloft. The wet spring meant she needed
extra bales to tide the herd over. She calls them "the girls" the animals

she loves and names and will kill to eat. The air in the barn is thick and moted.
The cobwebs garland light when the door swings wide. She forgot to wear her mask,
to keep her busted lungs from the boys' wet breath. My father

is angry. He won't say it and she won't either. Her voice low below
the running tap. He is angry the way I remember. The way he lifted his hand
over her body like a rabbit trap a wire noose sprung back

and hooked to a whipping branch. After she flushes and hangs up I call him, pretend
to hear the story for the first time. He is in the kitchen
his finger graphing viral death tolls in the air, potatoes foaming over on the stove.

What if fear of punishment is not what makes us good? He wants to know
what precautions I have taken: the blue gloved finger selecting unleaded
at the pump, the empty buses breezing through the 4 way stop, squatting

to piss behind the tractor trailer so I won't enter someone's house.
I don't tell him about the woman punched in the head by cops
the flag we stole and burned the broken cruiser window the tear gas

cough. It's been unseasonably hot, I say. The dog hates the fireworks
and the neighbor's heavy metal through the wall. I'm still sewing masks the rent is due
the bars are open but no I haven't gone inside. It's hot here too, he tells me, quiet.

Only the crabapples make pink noise in the corners of the mind,
the feeder pigs loose in the yard flop with sunburn, their shorn tails
useless against the hatching flies. My period came early, after we were gassed.

I pulled off the pepper-sprayed mask. I ate hot greasy chicken from the tienda
with my dirty hands, screamed at a helicopter and it screamed back. I say it's hot yes,
though it threatens rain every afternoon. He thinks my mother needs to be punished

so she will not get sick and die. He will not touch her the rest of the day.
Or touch what she has touched. She is in the garden. The plants are little torches in the straw.
Who would I be without punishment? I hear the seedlings blazing, crackling in the earth.

I hear her put her naked fingers to the flame.

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Copyright © 2022 H.R. Webster All rights reserved
from Iron Horse Literary Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission