Today's poem is by Paul Genega

Habits and Lies
       

My mother fainted a lot when she was young.
Once at a retreat for girls in the Catskills
she came to in a chapel surrounded by nuns

in white habits and thought she'd gone to heaven.
Whenever she told that story, there was a catch
in her throat; one felt her disappointment.

According to grandmother, my mother fainted a lot
because her appendix burst when she was small
and poison coursed through her for weeks.

That was also the reason she spent hours
in front of a mirror brushing her fine flaxen hair,
why she loved to hum hymns in the dark.

Perhaps it is also the reason her lingerie drawer
held copies of Mein Kampf and a pamphlet
entitled An Answer to Father Coughlin's Critics.

Not that my mother mentioned that cache.
She lived her life in the amnesia of the suburbs,
a post-war constructed with white habits and lies.

As for me, I was too embarrassed to admit
I'd ever rifled through her underwear drawer.
And now she's too dead to explain.

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Copyright © 2024 Paul Genega All rights reserved
from Outtakes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2023
Salmon Poetry
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission