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All This Living, All this Hurting

from All This Living: Selected Recorded Poems by Joshua Michael Stewart

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lyrics

ALL THIS LIVING, ALL THIS HURTING


Mother, you’ve been gone a year.
I still have the screenshot from the last time we zoomed,
your eyes dull with cataracts, a medical mask dangling
from your right ear, the shirt made for a ten-year-old girl
slipping off your shoulders.

Mother, are you with Frank, has he settled down, or is he raising
hell in Heaven like he did back on Earth and in our hearts?
Mother, is he finally happy? Are you happy?
Is your father there? Did you confront him, demand he tell you why
he did what we all know he did? Does it matter anymore?
Mother, is Grandma there, is Aunt Donna, Aunt Rose?
Have you started the bed-and-breakfast you guys
jawed about over coffee and Marlboros?

Do you remember the last day we spent together,
September 16, 2019?
How I commandeered a wheelchair
from the nurses’ station and we sat wheel-to-wheel,
watching but not really watching game shows?
Do you remember how I wrote out the alphabet
on a yellow legal pad, and you’d point
to the fat letters with your red nails, painted
by the young CNA you smiled wide for
every time she’d walk into your room?
Mother, do you remember the disease that held
your voice captive, that wouldn’t be satisfied
` until it took all of you?

Are you allowed to forget all you wish to forget?
Do you remember when you spelled out,
Do I deserve this?
I understood your question, wondering
if you drank the Parkinson’s into existence.
What did I tell you?
A younger, more vindictive me
would’ve told you, yes.
Are you still worried?
I’ve told you, no.
Please, stop asking.
Does it matter anymore—
all that living, all that hurting?

All week my apartment’s been inundated with flies,
twenty years I’ve lived here without a problem,
and now for three days they’ve been flying drunk
against my windows, swarming the lightbulb
above the stove—three days, I spent killing 106 flies,
flushed down the toilet.
Mother, did you send them?

credits

from All This Living: Selected Recorded Poems, released February 26, 2023

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Joshua Michael Stewart Massachusetts

Joshua Michael Stewart is a poet and musician living in Western Massachusetts.

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