Our Story Workout class gets folks writing fiction in class and all week between sessions. But what a lovely surprise when some of the exercises inspired Judy F. to write a couple poems:

ONE DAY IN THE LIFE

At 7:00 a.m. my mother crashes into morning,

Tanks up with a good breakfast for a good day:

O.J., milk and cereal for the kids,

For herself:  coffee, black, and a beer, frosty cold.

Mother hangs laundry, pausing only to vomit in the tulip bed.

Mother 7-Crowns her morning with a call to the cabbie

To circle by Cut-Rate Liquors for a bottle and a pack of coffin nails.

Mother drives three blocks to her mother’s house for

Afternoon communion:  coffee, wine and gossip at the kitchen table.

Home again by 4:00.  Lukewarm condiments decorate the table,

Ruptured hot dogs float with globules of grease in a pot on the stove.

Did she remember to eat lunch?

At least she remembered to turn off the stove this time.

For dinner mother fixes Chinese chop suey no Chinese would recognize.

Then dishes, homework supervised, the children dispatched to bed.

The sullen husband follows soon thereafter.

Dreary evening slides into somber night – my mother’s own time.

Another cigarette burns down to mother’s yellow finger tips

While she reads another novel of human folly

And drinks herself quite jolly.

Silence stands about me.

Loneliness attends.

Love did not bind you.

Tripped out of time by the disaster of disease,

You plunged out of life and into memory.

You snatched my heart and slipped away.

Great care hardly hindered you

as your little self slipped through my fingers,

like minnows sinking into opaque water,

like dreams dissipating in the sun’s resurrection.

Time:  mine like swimmers sucked by relentless currents

into the expansive sea.

Time:  yours like the waves’ foamy fingerlets

sucked into the anhydrous sands of the never ending beach.

The ties between us stretch to tenuous,

then imperceptibly desist.