Seeing Those Damn Greasy
        circa 2016

day-old chickens, hunched, roasted,
and stacked in clear
plastic domes
in a refrigerated case by the checkout
compel of all people God
help me my mother

who sashays over, purse swinging,
to their round half-off
stickers, and one
by one lifts each, closely
inspecting the trussed, browned
limbs therein, sometimes

bringing the plastic seam
of a package right up against her nose,
all the while describing much
much too loudly how a whole
chicken is dinner for two nights, and
what's left can be

shredded from the bone
for a salad, that you can't
go wrong, not for three dollars, you
simply can't go wrong—
this was back before
the cancer, before I saw

her face, her skin, barely differentiated
grays, her lying on the end
of a couch, tiny
under afghans, and realized, even
as it was happening realized, she was
looking at me with what was really

a kind of sidled wonder
as if trying to
account for me, for how such a large
busyness had emerged
whole from her body, and it was also
back before I learned

as I did, after she died,
that she had in accounts
not even my father
knew about, money almost no calculus
of parsimony could explain, no
daily palm sweeping

off the kitchen table from among
keys, wallet, and phone,
my father's change, no part-
time work, which she did, as a nurse,
for twenty years, money
enough to buy cartloads

of chickens, chickens prepared
special, whole platters of chickens fresh
from the deli counter—
makes me want to
retract into myself, there,
in the Shop Rite, my arms, electric

car antennae drawing back into
my sleeves, my head sinking tortoise-like
into the shell
of my torso, makes me want,
even though I understand, theoretically,
that a day may come when

a minute with her, even one of such
flaming public embarrassment,
will be as far from my grasp as
any culture's
vision of heaven, makes me
want, right there, on the spot, to

wink out like a soap bubble, a perfect
sphere of swirling color
poked by a child's finger.

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Copyright © 2022 Benjamin S. Grossberg All rights reserved
from River Styx
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission