Landscape with Mother
Bills piled on the dining room table
and my mother with her head bent
under a bouffant of hair. Some might
think it’s worry that’s weighing her down,
that if not for the cost of living, my mother
would sprout wings, maybe soar across
a field where home and food and electric
were rich brown soil and berries and stars.
Some might say she could fly low
onto a jagged rock that juts up to meet her,
shapes itself to what she needs, the wildflowers
that grow in the tiny cracks
reaching up in surrender, in prayer.