The rule is clinical:
keep your hands inside the seventy-mile radius,
two hours of driving, maximum.
Beyond that fence, the world ceases to be your business.

I get it
until the midnight phone call
finds me in the dark.

A cough from across the ocean.
My mother’s voice, smaller than I remember.

For three seconds, I break the law.
I look east—

The damp soil she kneels in,
how it enters her fingernails as she weeds alone,
how the same sun that sets on my clean suburban lawn
is already rising there—heavy and red—
hammering her brittle spine into the earth.

I hang up.
I check the digital clock,
counting the sixty-cycle hum of an American grid.
The sun has already risen in her skin.
I lie back down in the dark,
my spine aligned with the radius,
waiting for the shadow of her mountain
to cross the ocean.