Eight Months After the Accident
Ain Khan
Matte
Holly Pelesky
aren’t you glad I came back from the dead?
my mother asks, hand on hip, ladling onto my plate
her famous karahi chicken, simmered
in spices so long it forgets it was once poultry.
poetry, I say, this tastes like poetry. but what if you had come back
without the memory of this recipe? she smiles.
things my mother remembered after the coma: what she wore
on her 65th birthday, the exact amount on a Walmart gift card,
the fish (who’s feeding the fish?), driving with my father last fall
through reddening leaves, wearing a red scarf.
a life lived in no specific order. dream-like nightmares.
a nightmare of a reality.
the first afternoon, when the clock struck five, she cried:
your father should’ve been home by now. my father was already Home.
she relearns to how to breathe, how to sit up, how to brush her teeth,
how to sift between delusion & certainty.
my mother wipes up the bottom of the pot with a piece
of roti, like the old times.
I stare at the scar across her scalp. the karahi chicken tastes
unbroken.
Holly Pelesky is a writer first, a photographer next, although that could always change. Her collection of letters to her daughter, Cleave, was published by Autofocus Books. She likes to take pictures of daily beauties that remind her to slow down and marvel. She works as a librarian while raising boys in Omaha.